


take my hand (take my whole life too)

by layersofsilence, SgtGraves



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Captain America Reverse Big Bang 2018, Fluff, M/M, Non-Serum Steve Rogers/Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes | Shrinkyclinks, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-HYDRA Reveal, Self-Discovery, two self-sacrificing idiots learn to be maybe a little less self-sacrificing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-13
Updated: 2018-06-15
Packaged: 2019-05-21 15:44:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 36,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14918195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/layersofsilence/pseuds/layersofsilence, https://archiveofourown.org/users/SgtGraves/pseuds/SgtGraves
Summary: HYDRA may have been revealed and taken down in the span of a few hours, but the repercussions are far more extensive. Steve Rogers, now ex-SHIELD agent, expects to be feeling them in his life for years. What he didn't expect was for them to reach into him and change the most fundamental thing he thought he knew about himself - that he doesn't have a soulmate.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [take my hand (take my whole life too) (Art)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14934369) by [SgtGraves](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SgtGraves/pseuds/SgtGraves). 



> they say it takes a village, and i think the nebulous They are right. massive, massive thank you to my amazing artist [sgt-graves](http://sgt-graves.tumblr.com) for the inspirational art, not just one but two gorgeous additional pieces, and the cheerleading on top of that. WR+FB :') many many thanks are also due to the wonderful [eidheann](eidheann.tumblr.com), who beta'd this with great speed and patience for my misuse of commas. and @ the slack folks who sprinted with me, got shit done with me, and cheerleaded me, you are too many to name and i appreciate you all ❤
> 
> last but not least, thank you to the rbb mods for all the work you out in to make this such a wonderful & well-organised event. ❤

  


  
Steve has, over the course of his life, had some very bad days: he’s waded into more fights than has ever been good for him, he’s ended up in the hospital more times than he can remember, and he once nearly lost two teeth from a faint brought on by low blood sugar. It’s important to know this, so that there’s some context when he says that this day has been the worst day of his _entire life._

 _This_ day had taken an abrupt turn for the worse after his lunch break and only picked up speed from there. It had gone careening past ‘bad’ and barely bothered to look at trite adjectives like ‘awful’ or ‘horrible’. It’d glanced at the self-imposed standards Steve had for ‘official worst day ever’ and leapt straight past them to land somewhere in the realm of ‘successfully made Steve want to crawl out of his body and throw himself into the icy waters of the Atlantic’.

It’s been a really shitty day.

And as he and Sharon return to their apartment it must show, somehow, in their faces or in the slump of their bodies, because the standoffish neighbour whose name Steve can never remember actually pauses outside his door for once, on his way to his evening shift. “Woah,” Neighbour says, as Sharon tries for a third time to get her key through the door. Her hand’s shaking. Steve would offer to help, but his own hands are so tightly clenched that he’s not sure he could pry them apart to try. “Bad day?”

There’s a long and uncomfortable pause as Neighbour waits for an answer. The set of Sharon’s face doesn’t change, doesn’t even flicker, and Steve’s not entirely sure whether she heard the question at all, she’s that out of it. A laugh tries to bubble up from Steve’s chest, partly because he has to laugh if he want to keep from crying and partly because, well, today’s been the dictionary definition of _bad day_. “Pal, you have no idea,” Steve musters up, eventually. Neighbour nods at this, apparently satisfied, and departs as though nothing is wrong, as though the infrastructure of the world hasn’t shifted irrevocably. Sharon finally gets her key into the fucking keyhole and stumbles over the threshold at the sudden give of the doorway. Steve scrapes his feet off the floor long enough to drag himself inside after her.

“Bad day,” Sharon mutters, rubbing at her already-reddened eyes. “Bad _fucking_ day. Jesus.”

“Jesus,” Steve mumbles in agreement. He’s not entirely sure how he gets to the sofa, but he manages it somehow, and he will take what he can get: he flops down on it without a second thought. He feels - he’s jittery, is the thing, as though he’s had too many cups of coffee, adrenaline coursing through his veins like lightning. And yet, at the same time he’s totally drained, feels like he’s been flayed open and had tiredness injected right down into the marrow of his bones. He wants to rest but he doesn't want to sleep. He kind of wants to eat, but he definitely doesn’t want to fuck around in the kitchen trying to throw together something palatable. Even boiling water seems like an insurmountable task.

Sharon shuffles towards the television, and for all his fatigue Steve’s still cognizant enough to realise that news, right now, is a bad idea. “Sharon, no,” he says. “Don’t -”

Too late: _BREAKING NEWS_ , the television blares, an angry red news ticker along the bottom reading _New online data dump indicates SHIELD infiltrated by neo-Nazi affiliates._

Even further below that, they’re wondering _Has SHIELD failed us?_

“Yes,” Sharon says blankly, one finger resting against the accusatory question mark. “Yes we have.” Steve wants to protest the self-flagellation, but - he’s in no position to do that. It’s true, after all. Fuck, but it’s true. They’ve all been fucking blind. Captain America himself - that’s how high they’d been infiltrated. Captain America had been a neo-Nazi.

The newscaster on screen is appropriately horrified, eyebrows ticking up and down with her every word. Steve watches, and even though he has his hearing aids in he doesn’t absorb a word she’s saying, only her concerned expression, the nervous tic that runs through her hands as she shuffles papers on her desk. Sharon takes a step back and slumps, as though her strings have been cut, against the side of the sofa.

A tear shivers its way down her face and Steve’s anger drains away, for the moment, at the sight. He reaches out and nudges her shoulder gently with his foot, and when she looks back at him he makes sure to have his eyes fixed on the television, where an incredibly stereotypical professor - elbow patches and all - of something tangentially related to government agencies is gravely attempting to explain in normal human words that, yes, this data dump and its contents looked legitimate, and what they said was bad for the world three times over.

“Hey,” Steve says once the news has given way to ads, his eyes fixed on their vivid flashiness as Sharon tries to be discreet about wiping her eyes. “At least we won’t have to go to work tomorrow, huh?” As far as reassurances go it’s pretty weak, because it only leads to thoughts about how this unexpected leave is the result of an unexpected loss of job, but Sharon still tries to rally.

“Hey, sure,” she says, dragging the corners of her mouth upwards in something that only slightly resembles a smile. “Wish it was paid leave -” she starts, and then chokes, slightly, and goes pale. Well, paler. “Fuck,” she says, so softly that Steve’s not sure he’s even meant to hear it.

“What?” he asks anyway.

“It’s, it’s just,” Sharon stutters out, “no other agency’s ever going to want me. And I can’t be a nurse for real, I suck at everything about hospitals, I _like_ being an agent -” she breaks off again to make an unintelligible noise and stick her face directly into the sofa cushions next to her. It’s not precisely a wise choice, given the state of their sofa, but currently that is the last thing on their minds.

“You’ll - you’ll find something,” Steve says, very awkwardly, because his brain is slightly preoccupied with the thought of having to find a new source of income himself. He considers trying to comfort Sharon on the nurse front as well, because she can pretend a pretty great bedside manner, but it’s true that her technical medical knowledge is severely lacking and, knowing her, that’s what she’ll be fixating on. He keeps his mouth shut and nudges her shoulder again. She leans into the contact slightly, and closes her eyes.

“Welcome back,” the news anchor says, successfully recapturing their attention. “Our top stories: intelligence agency SHIELD appears to have been infiltrated by a neo-Nazi cult, according to a new online -”

She doesn’t get to finish, because Steve heaves himself off the couch to stab the TV off at the source. He doesn’t need to hear any more about how a group of radical terrorists infiltrated the organisation he’s been working for, doesn’t need to hear about how everyone had sat by with their thumbs up their asses without even realising that anything was wrong, doesn’t need to hear about how fucking blind they’ve all been. Steve knows, alright, he fucking _knows_. And Sharon’s thoughts seem to be going down a similar route, if the way she stands up again and starts to pace is any indication.

The silence that follows on the tail end of the brassiness of the news program rings through the apartment. That might not be a good thing, because now Steve’s brain has no distractions, so it starts to focus instead: every mission he’s assisted in, every time he’s been given a situation and told to come up with a plan, every time he’s been given the information for a mission and told to make a judgement call for the agents going in. How many of those facts had been lies? How many times had he furthered the plans of a Nazi cult?

Sharon’s right. No other government agency, no other security agency - fuck, probably no freelance mercenary company, even - is ever going to want to employ them after this. And for all that he doesn’t like to admit it, doesn’t like the thought, they’d be right not to.

He doesn’t know how long he’d just lie on the couch and try to parse out everything he’s ever done or helped with or said, with this new context behind it, if it was left up to him. It probably wouldn’t be healthy though, and it’d definitely end with him sunk so deep into the pillows that he’d need to be hauled out. Sadly, his plans to physically merge and become one with the couch are derailed the instant Sharon turns around; her eyes grow hazy and then refocus, and the next thing Steve knows she’s sunk down on the middle of the carpet with a painful-sounding thud that has Steve wincing in sympathy, leaning into someone he can’t see.

“I’m so tired,” she whispers, and even though Steve averts his eyes, automatic and respectful - it’s the encouraged thing, around soulmates in step with each other, but even so it doesn’t take a genius to know that this is a private moment - he can’t exactly help but to hear when Sharon keeps going. “I thought I was doing the right thing -”

Her voice breaks. Steve knows without looking at her that she’s crying; he also know she will be supremely embarrassed about the fact tomorrow morning, if she thinks he’d seen it.

Steve would like to pretend that his getting up and leaving at that point is altruistic, that it was simply borne out of a desire not to intrude any further on what is clearly a private moment, but Sharon’s words hit a little too close to home for that to be true. He does not want to hear about how she thought she was being the good guy, how she thought she was helping, and how she feels now that it turns out she’s been duped, because it’s precisely how he feels and he’s not nearly ready to vocalise that, or hear it.

His bed is slightly more welcoming than the couch, at least. Steve’s glasses press uncomfortably into the bridge of his nose when he stuffs his face into his pillow, but he can’t bring himself to care.

A fucking _Nazi organisation._

Angry tears prick at the corners of his eyes, and he balls up his fist and punches his pillow. He thinks it’s fair to say that he’s been trying to do good things - the _right_ things - his whole life. And now look where that’s gotten him. The files had shown that HYDRA had infiltrated SHIELD enough to be effective long before Steve and Sharon had ever even joined the organisation. They’ve - _he’s_ \- given half a decade of his life to Nazis.

Steve just wants his brain to turn off, but now that he’s alone and surrounded by silence everything from before is returning with a vengeance, his brain kicked into hyperdrive and building up that slow smouldering anger that’s frightening because he doesn’t know how it’ll manifest. His thoughts are still ticking over every single mission he’s ever advised, ever formulated game plans for, ever monitored through a tenuous camera or radio connection from his desk. The lies, once he tries to identify them, seem endless: HYDRA could have told him almost anything as long as they got to the mission briefings and reports before he did. With enough people involved, it’d evidently been easy to lie to Steve, who was tied to his desk, whose equipment vacillated between cheap crap and bewildering new prototypes, who trusted the information he’d been given. And there _had_ been enough people: Robin three desks over from him had been arrested; Alice in the room next door, Jimmy from IT. And they were just the New York division; things had been so much worse in SHIELD’s DC headquarters. Fuck, Captain America and the Secretary of Defence who’d backed Rumlow for the job had both been rotten. The scope and range of HYDRA operatives were horrifying.

Gentle, muffled talking starts filtering through Steve’s door, and he assumes that Sharon’s still talking to her soulmate, probably guiding the pair of them into her own room where they’ll have a slightly more believable semblance of privacy. She already sounds better; her voice is clearer and firmer. Perks of having a soulmate, Steve thinks, unaccountably vicious with it. He’s known since he was ten that he didn’t have a soulmate, nobody to fall in step with. He’s not usually angry about it anymore. But then, it feels like he could be angry at anything, right now. His mind is simmering to the point where he can be enraged about things he thought he’d accepted years ago.

Steve’s always - well, he’s searched, and he’s good at looking through his own mind now, but he’s never felt a bond. Or, well, that’s not entirely accurate: his bond wasn’t a thing that led anywhere when he tried to follow the thread of it, and he inevitably ends up going round and round in his own head, no trace of another presence when there should be a mind connected to his, strong and vital. The bond is meant to be prominent, unmissable, constantly present, and Steve’s certainly never felt anything like that, isn’t sure he’d recognise it now even if he did. Even children feel bonds, even people whose soulmates have died still feel their bonds, weaker but present, leading somewhere their own minds can’t go but still _going somewhere._

If only to take his mind off its crawling hyperfixation on every work-related thing he’s ever done, Steve tries again now, lets himself sink into his own mind. Like every other time he’s tried, his tight muscles relax in increments as he gets lost in the search, as he follows the thin thread that’s slightly not-him. And, like every other time he’s tried, all that good work is promptly undone by the way he tenses unhappily at the ugly, unpleasant sensation of an utter lack of response.

He didn’t think the bond would miraculously be there. Fuck, he’d known it wasn’t going to be there; it hasn’t been there his entire fucking life. He’s never known what it was like to step out and find himself in the company of a soulmate, and likewise never experienced a soulmate following their bond through to step in and see him. He’s always been dreadfully, undeniably, present in his surroundings when it’s estimated that the people around him might spend up to ten percent of their lives in step with their soulmate before they physically meet.

But. Well, Steve thinks, burying his face further in his pillow as though he can avoid his own thoughts, it would’ve been nice if someone had come along. It would’ve been nice to have someone to comfort him.

~*~

Facts, Steve has decided, are terrible. Facing them is even worse, especially the set of facts that comprise of Steve and Sharon’s current situation: they are currently jobless, they have no references from their last place of work, they have shit all chance of getting another job in their chosen and preferred fields, and they are also potentially homeless. SHIELD owned (owns?) the apartment building they’re living in and all of SHIELD-no-actually-HYDRA’s assets are being systematically frozen and seized by the government: it’s only a matter of time before they make it to the building. Their best case scenario is that the rent goes up exponentially, and it says a lot that Steve is hoping for that instead of the alternative. He kind of wants to go and marinate in self-pity somewhere, but their situation makes even that seem like a luxury.

It doesn’t exactly help that Sharon has summarily quit her undercover job at the hospital. She wouldn’t have been happy there, and it was likely that she was going to be fired soon in any case, but the loss of income still hurts. Well, it hurts Steve; Sharon has to be talked out of throwing her hospital scrubs out of the window in half-hearted celebration.

“Don’t do that,” Steve says, mostly from having spent years watching his mom treat her hospital scrubs as though they were covered in mud. “Give them back to the hospital. Or maybe burn them.”

“The hospital won’t take them,” Sharon frowns. “They think they can convince me to come back.”

“Come back?” Steve repeats, incredulous. Sharon does a strange shrug-nod combination, and stretches more on the sofa.

“If I went and got the proper qualifications, which, y’know,” she says. “Not happening.”

An unintelligible groaning noise bursts out of Steve’s throat. “You fucker,” he swears at her. “Do you know what I’d do for that kind of financial stability?” Sharon shrugs. She has an inheritance to fall back on. “ _Frightening things_ , Sharon.”

“I saw an ad for a coffee place on the noticeboard,” Sharon says, digging around in her pockets and proffering a fairly pathetic-looking piece of creased and crumpled paper. “For what it’s worth, I think you should raise your standards, slightly. Don’t punish yourself with a shitty job when you can do better.”

“Coffee places are fine,” Steve says, taking the paper. There’s no element of self-punishment to this at all, he thinks, and almost manages to convince himself. “Sharon,” he says a second later, “you’re meant to just tear off one of the phone slips at the bottom.”

“Eh,” Sharon says. “Less competition.” Which is true, but it still doesn’t quite sit right. “Plus, we both know you’re going to get the job anyway.”

“We do?” Steve asks doubtfully. Sharon nods and starts spouting some nonsense about hipster aesthetic and his glasses. Steve frowns at her, but she remains unfazed.

She turns out to be right, anyway, because when he finally finds the tiny hole-in-the-wall place, the harried manager only pauses for as long as it takes for her to locate her pen (buried in her messy bun) to add Steve’s name to her roster. He brings the staff up to a grand total of seven names, which doesn’t exactly inspire great confidence, but it’s a wage, and it’s a little higher than minimum, even. He’ll take it.

This is a step forward, Steve tells himself on the way back to his apartment. He would try to breathe deeply to clear his mind, but the neighbourhood’s air is already giving him a migraine, and it legitimately feels like a deep enough breath of this neighbourhood’s air will poison him, trigger an asthma attack, or both. This is a step forward. He can barely think it without rolling his eyes. It’s true that working at a coffee shop is a step up from ‘unemployed’, but when one takes into consideration the fact that only a few days ago ago – not even a few weeks ago! – Steve was happily working in a very good job that he liked and which offered him reasonable pay and generous benefits, well, everything he has now is a precipitous step down. Except for the Nazis, he supposes, and feels a frown turn down his face.

Because the world positively refuses to give him a break, when Steve gets back to the flat there’s an eviction notice taped to the door with what looks like an entire roll of duct tape, and a letter in his mailbox (and Sharon’s, and every other letterbox in the wall) which, when opened, informs him in cheery yellow and pink that this building has been condemned and is scheduled to be torn down in two weeks. In Calibri, no less. Steve decides, on the spot, that he has never liked Calibri.

“Sharon?” Steve asks as he opens the door, praying that she’s not home so he doesn’t have to break the news. He doesn’t know where the fuck else she’d be, but he doesn’t want her to be here. Naturally she’s here anyway, having thrown herself into whittling little misshapen animals and trying to sell them on Etsy after failing to learn how to knit. Little wood shavings are flying everywhere. An assembly line of small animals is facing Steve from the table.

“Yeah?” she asks. “Does this look like an elephant to you?”

She holds the supposed elephant out and even from next to the door, Steve is more likely to label the thing a demented seal than an elephant.

“Uh...no?” he says, surprised enough that the hand clutching their eviction notice stays hanging limply down at his side.

“Yeah, I accidentally chopped his trunk off,” Sharon admits. “Can’t charge much for him now, huh.”

“Charge as much as you can fuckin’ get away with,” Steve says, shoving the paper in his hand in front of Sharon. Her eyes scan the document, and then her hand slips as the message registers so she ends up shoving her Whittlin’ Jack into her thumb. “Fucking _ow.”_

“Fucking _Calibri_ ,” Steve says, choosing to be deeply offended by this choice of font, because the alternative is letting his mind go down a panicky spiral of possibilities he might be subjected to now that he officially has no place to live.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Sharon says, and throws her whittling knife and fucked up elephant at the wall.

“I hate the housing market,” Steve grumbles, but no matter how strong his hatred is, he still sits down and starts forcing himself to comb through the classified ads. And keep looking, and keep looking, until it’s 3am and his eyes have forgotten how to comprehend reality.

“This is going to become a habit, isn’t it,” Sharon sighs, bloodshot eyes trying and failing to focus on Steve after hours of searching through ads. It’s the first thing Steve’s hearing aids have picked up in hours, and he’s only a little embarrassed to admit that he jumps at the noise.

“Only until we find a new place,” he promises, blinking hard through his headache. “Or are kicked out and start living on the street, I guess.”

“Fuck you, no, don’t say that. Just - just keep those thoughts to yourself, please,” Sharon groans, returning to her task with renewed vigour. Well, she managed to blink properly, but at 3.02am that counted as vigour.

In all likelihood it’s that vigour that takes them almost ten days to find a place they can live without winding up horrendously in debt. And to make things worse, they have to lock it down without a showing: a risky move but a necessary one, given that by the time they find the place, crunch their numbers, and successfully negotiate the landlord down to a price they’re all unhappy with in the true spirit of compromise, it’s about two days until they’re due to be evicted and they still have a shitload to pack.

The apartment, when they get to it, is not much of a surprise, which is saying something, since Steve had made sure that his expectations were perilously close to less than minimum (maybe a few holes in the roof were okay?). Their new apartment is one among hundreds just like it, crammed into an overcrowded building on an overcrowded street. It bypasses ‘cosy’ in favour of ‘desperately poky’ and somehow still manages to be expensive enough to make Steve’s eyes water and his head hurt. Its one redeeming feature is that it’s in the same neighbourhood as Steve’s coffee shop, which means that his walk to work in the mornings is shorter. That also means, however, that he’s living in the same poisonous air that he’d been so hesitant to breathe in on the day of his job interview, which he feels effectively cancels out the benefits of living near his work. Also, his manager told him that he’s now the go-to for emergency shift covers, which is a fairly horrifying concept. Steve doesn’t mind the money, but he does mind the work.

“Home sweet home,” Sharon says, surrounded by boxes of furniture. It’s pretty much all SHIELD-owned, because their previous apartment had come pre-furnished, but they’re petty and it’d felt at least kind of satisfying to take it all. Plus, it saved them from buying new furniture, so it counted as severance pay, kind of.

‘Home sweet home’ turns out to be the only words that Sharon can bring herself to say on the subject of their new apartment. Unlike their jobs, there’s no way they can even begin to pretend that this is a step up, which means that, in mutual silent agreement, they simply don’t talk about it.

~*~

The coffee shop - Sharon starts calling it ‘Steve’s coffee shop’ because she can’t be fucked to remember its actual, very unimaginative name of Corner Coffee Shop - is a tiny place that’d originally been painted yellow, presumably to give off a cheery atmosphere. Unfortunately for everyone who stepped foot inside, residue from heated beverages and their multitude of flavours - as well as a few baking mishaps and who knows what else - have collectively stained the entire place a darker and much less appealing shade which makes even Steve’s bad eyes ache a little. He’d try to mitigate the situation by focusing on the machines and counter, which are at least a palatable silver and brown respectively, but they’re also both worn and beaten up enough that it makes him sad to watch them for too long. Nevertheless, all the staring has at least one positive side: it helps Steve catch on pretty fast to how everything works, and combined with his fairly accurate hand-eye coordination it means he’s relegated to the role of barista more often than not. It means less interaction with people, and that is always a good thing.

Still, the place is small enough and management is stingy enough to force everyone to do slightly more than they anticipated, so Steve is inevitably pushed to the register a few times a week. To the surprise of nobody, really, he turns out to not be very great at the social interaction part of working in food service. And just to make things worse than they need to be, his purportedly very busy manager always finds time out of her very busy schedule on the days that Steve is manning the counter to tell him to smile more. It is supremely useless advice and never fails to makes Steve want to spontaneously combust. The customers have never and will never pay attention to what anyone behind the counter ever does.

Case in point: the woman in front of him doesn’t even look up from her phone as she picks up, nearly drops, and regains possession of her coffee order. Steve tries to sigh through bared teeth, and his manager catches his eye and mouths ‘smile!’ complete with exclamation mark from the back of the shop where she’s fiddling with the community noticeboard. Steve hauls the corners of his mouth upwards, tries not to feel like death is looming over him, and mostly fails.

His temples throb and he has to bite back another sigh. If his head doesn’t cut that out immediately then the five hours he has left on his shift are going to be insufferable. He knows from previous painful experience that any migraine that starts now is going to get worse – a lot worse – before it gets better.

“You okay there?” Kamala asks him, voice low, as she takes advantage of a brief lull in customers to wipe down the unhappily chugging coffeemaker. The only - and Steve really does mean the only - good thing about working here was that all of his coworkers were in a similar situation to him both in and out of work, which meant that there was always something they could talk about, whether that be annoying customers or money worries. Steve would go so far as to classify some of them as his friends, he thinks.

“Fine,” he says. “Just a headache.”

“Again?” Kamala frowns, but doesn’t push further at Steve’s shrug. “I’ve got aspirin,” she offers instead.

“I’ve got Ibuprofen in my bag,” Steve says. “Thanks, though.”

“They always been this bad?” Kamala asks, and, well, so much for no more prying. Steve doesn’t want to say yes because it’d be a lie, but he doesn’t want to say no either, because he doesn’t like being the focus of anyone’s concern. His hesitation seems to be enough of an answer, though, and Kamala says, “You should probably see someone about that.”

“Eh,” Steve gets out, accompanying his attempt to shrug off her concern with a literal shrug. Kamala’s eyes go a little sharp, and even though she stops pushing Steve finds himself wary. That look means she’s not done talking about this. “I’m fine,” he tries, in a vain attempt to get her to back off. She only raises her eyebrows and turns away more firmly.

By the time the afternoon rolls around, Steve’s brain is completely occupied with trying not to sway on his feet, and he’s pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to tell a judge in a courtroom what’s coming out of his mouth whenever a customer comes up to the counter. His head _throbs_ , insistent and pounding, and the slightly unsteady rhythm of it is all that Steve’s able to register. The migraines he’s been having recently - since he found out about HYDRA actually, and it’s slightly cathartic to blame this on them, too - are different to his normal ones in that they’re not localised to a specific area; his whole brain seems to be the problem.

“You don’t look so good,” Kamala mutters to him.

“I’m going to grab some Ibuprofen,” Steve says, squinting as best he can in her general direction. “Take the counter -?” Kamala doesn’t even bother to reply, simply waves him away with a furrow between her eyebrows.

The pills are rough against his throat as they go down, even accompanied as they are by a glass of water (that really probably should have been boiled before Steve drank it, but he tries not to think about that).

“You look like shit, you really do,” Kamala says, sticking her head into the break room.

“Thanks,” Steve mumbles sourly. He feels like shit too, but he’s not about to go and admit that to his coworker-maybe-friend.

“You should probably head home,” Kamala says, and sighs loudly when Steve shakes his head and starts to protest. “Steve, you look bad enough that your soulmate’s probably feeling it. Go home.”

“I don’t have a soulmate,” Steve says. He's tired enough, stressed enough, and in enough pain to think that this of all things is a good comeback instead of something that’s just going to weird his coworker out. At least his addled brain thinks this for a second, and by then the damage is done and Steve has to deal with regret on top of his headache as Kamala’s eyes widen and then go soft.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she says, and it takes Steve a long fuzzy moment before he realises she thinks that his soulmate is dead, not that he doesn’t have one. 

“S’fine,” he mumbles, not sure whether to be relieved or not. “No one’s getting any killer migraines off me.”

Kamala frowns, reaches out to touch Steve’s forehead. She succeeds, too, despite his grumpy attempts to flick her away.

“I’m fine,” he insists. “They come and go, and I kinda need the money. I can at least finish my shift.”

Thankfully, before Kamala can find a response that’s highly likely to be negative or at least neutral, their manager sticks her head in through the doorway and clears her throat pointedly. There are coffee grounds spilled down her front because she might be good at management, but she is terrible at actually making coffee. Steve snatches the opportunity to head back to the counter; he can hear Kamala’s quiet tsk as he does, and she steps on his heel as she walks past him to the machines to make it absolutely clear that she disapproves, so that Steve has to take a second to try and shove his foot back in his shoe while also attempting to maintain a steady smile at the oblivious customer. His manager unhelpfully mimes a smile at him from the table she’s chatting to.

~*~

By the time Steve gets back to his new apartment his shoulder is aching for no conceivable reason and he’s not happy about it. His body has never listened to his unhappiness though, so nothing really happens except that he stews in the pain and grow increasingly grumpy about the world in general. So regardless of the fact that he doesn’t exactly mean to slam the door to the apartment shut behind him, it’s slightly cathartic, even after the loud unpleasantness makes its way through his hearing aids.

He regrets the action almost immediately, though, because the first thing he sees once he turns around properly is Sharon, slumped on the couch with an absent eyes and a soft smile. Steve knows what she looks like when she’s stepped out to wherever her soulmate is, and he gentles his movements immediately, pats the door once as though that will make the noise of a few seconds ago quieter. It’s hard to splinter someone who’s in step with their soulmate, especially from this end of things - most splinterings happen from the receiving soulmate’s end - but it’s still possible, and there’s no point in tempting fate.

Sharon’s either still stepped out when Steve heads to bed, or at least he sees no sign of her; he thinks it’s fair enough, then, that he’s not expecting to be shaken awake in the middle of the night, and yet somehow and for some reason that’s _exactly what happens_. Steve can only flail, uncoordinated and struggling to remember anything useful from the yearly self-defence seminar SHIELD had made a habit of forcing their employees to go to.

“Okay,” Sharon’s voice comes from somewhere above his head, filtering through his sleep-fogged brain, “so we’re clearly gonna have to work on your self-defence before -”

“What?” Steve asks as she continues talking, too preoccupied with the relief that it’s only Sharon to register her excited words. Or, well, he thinks it’s Sharon; it sounds like Sharon, but his current glasses-less state has left him barely able to identify a blob, let alone a person. “Can I get my glasses?”

“What the - didn’t you hear what I said?” Sharon asks, her tone incredulous even as she shoves her hand under Steve’s pillow and shoves his glasses in his hands.

“No,” Steve says. “What did you say?”

“I said _we get to go back to SHIELD_ ,” Sharon screeches. Steve stares. He can feel his face going slack with surprise.

“I’m - going to need some more explanation, here,” Steve says, and tries to sit up. He fails, naturally, because Sharon has apparently found a seat on his stomach and he lacks the core muscle strength required to throw her off.

“Coulson called,” Sharon says, and bounces on Steve’s ribs. “Well, he texted, and then I called him, but -”

“Coulson?”

“ _Yes_ , Coulson. You remember him.”

“I don’t know,” Steve says doubtfully, trying to filter through his sleepy and uncooperative memory for something that will illuminate Sharon’s excitement. “I wasn’t in your field agent gang -”

“He wasn’t a field agent,” Sharon says impatiently. “I mean, he was, but that was before we were agents, he was head of logistics, c’mon, Steve -”

“Alright, alright, Coulson called, so fucking what?” Steve asks, and tries to turn over and bury his face in his pillow. He fails, again, because Sharon is still sitting on him and he’s kind of pinned in place.

“Steve,” Sharon says, and for all her previous vibrating excitement she’s stilled, now, and her voice is soft and serious. “Steve, they’re starting SHIELD again.”

“They’re -” Steve sputters. It might be the unholy hour or, the fact that he’s just been rudely woken up, or both, but his brain needs several moments to work through this. SHIELD had been shut down so suddenly, so comprehensively, and for such a thoroughly good reason - Steve hadn’t ever really bothered to entertain the thought that they might pop back up, the proverbial bad penny. Or, possibly, the proverbial hydra’s head. From the way Sharon is glowing at her own news, though, the sentiment is decidedly not returned. “Since when?”

“Since just tonight. We even get two weeks of pay, look -” Her fingers shake as she tries to unlock her phone. Steve swats at her, pushes the phone down.

“Stop, stop it, I believe you,” he says. “Did you have to wake me up in the middle of the night -”

“Steve, come on,” Sharon says. “We get to go back to work!”

“I already _have_ work,” Steve says. “And I have a morning shift tomorrow, so can I go back to sleep now, please?”

That makes Sharon back off, her eyes going wide as she steps away from Steve. “Steve, what? You can’t think - how - SHIELD’s coming back, you don’t need to, to be a waiter anymore -”

“Being a barista is fine,” Steve says, absolutely unconvincingly.

“Give it up, you complain about it too much to pull it off,” Sharon says, the first hints of anger creeping in alongside the incredulity in her voice. “You seriously don’t want to go back to SHIELD?”

Steve had fully planned to just roll over and go back to sleep once Sharon got off his stomach, but something about the way she asks him that - as though the idea is so entirely absurd - rubs him the wrong way.

“Is that really so surprising?” he asks. “Sharon, they were literal Nazis. I’m glad as hell not to be having any more interaction with them.”

“They were - I mean, not all of them -”

“Enough were! Are you really going to defend that -”

“No,” Sharon snaps. “Never. But now we have a chance to go back to what we were meant to be, what we started out as -”

“Which you’d know about so well,” Steve snaps. Sharon flinches at the words, and Steve sighs, rubs his eyes. “Sorry. That was unfair. I just - I just don’t know if I want to go back to SHIELD.”

“Fine,” Sharon says, all coldness.

“Sharon -” Steve starts, but his eyes feel weighed down and his brain can’t come up with anything to say.

“Tomorrow, then,” Sharon says, when Steve doesn’t make another sound. She doesn’t slam the door as she leaves the room, but she closes it very pointedly, which is almost worse. For all that Steve is tired and needs to get back to sleep as soon as he can to be able to face his morning shift, his brain helpfully gives him enough time to feel positively miserable before letting him drift off to sleep again.

~*~

When Steve’s alarm wakes him up, dawn light is just starting to filter through the very cheap and very ugly paisley curtains next to his bed, and Steve remembers exactly what’d happened in the middle of the night. He’s not sure whether that’s unfortunate or not.

“Sharon?” he calls as he makes his way into the living area, but he’s not exactly surprised when the apartment turns out to be empty. He’s slightly surprised to find a note on the table, although that wanes once he reads it: _Going to SHIELD_ , Sharon’s written. _Might be back late_. The ‘since I actually like my job’ and ‘since I want to avoid you’ are barely implied, but they’re still there, hanging disapprovingly in the air between Steve and the paper.

Possibly the worst thing about the whole affair is that his coffee shop is unpleasantly cold and oily today, despite the fact that it is literally their business to make hot beverages. Or, possibly, it’s just as cold and oily as usual, except that now Steve’s mind is on his old job and what he’d loved about it it, about taking factors and abilities and agents and analysing them all: who does best with this, with that, there? What is it that will disable this, or them? How do we use this as an advantage?

It’s never been the most conventional job, but Steve likes it. He had liked it: it’d been like playing chess, but immensely more satisfying.

For all that he’d liked the job, though, that was it: he’d liked it. Sharon had been raised on stories of her aunt’s escapades, of the great and legendary Captain Carter, the first Captain America. There had barely ever been anything else for her. Everyone defined themselves with something, and on Sharon’s 13th birthday her Aunt Peggy had gotten Nick Fury to save her the title of Agent 13: Sharon had been Agent 13 since her early twenties and a Super Secret Agent since she was five and had a vague understanding of what espionage was. It really wasn’t that surprising, once he thought about it, that she’d reacted so fiercely to his comparatively clean break from the thing she’s poured her entire life into.

And, possibly more than that, SHIELD had been managing the Captain Americas ever since Peggy brought the title into existence. Peggy Carter had been a pioneer, had been the first Captain America, and for all that the Captains had become more government puppets than independents with each successive holder of the title, the title had still _meant something_. To have the Secretary of State personally recommend Brock Rumlow for the job, and for the two of them to be revealed as neo-Nazis? It stood against everything Aunt Peggy had ever striven for. It was a total and utter perversion of what she’d created. Sharon was well within her rights to be emotional about that, and Steve knew it.

“Steve,” Elijah snaps as the milk boils over. Steve swears, effectively jerked back to the present, and tries to salvage the milk without burning his hand off. He succeeds, marginally.

“ _Steve_ ,” Elijah sighs, and pointedly turns the tap on. When Steve is deemed to slow to react, Elijah also grabs the hand in question and sticks it under the running water in what is probably an unnecessary gesture. Probably. It is nice of him, though.

“Sorry,” Steve says.

“We all have them days,” Elijah says. His eyes flick downwards as he says it though, concerned, and it’s only then that Steve realises he’s rubbing his chest with his free hand, quick anxious motions that don’t do much to soothe the blossoming ache in his ribs. He hadn’t even realised he’d been hurting, but now that his attention’s been drawn to the area he almost wants to double over, or sit down, or something.

“Fuck,” he mutters. He’s going to have to see Dr. Erskine about this; they might let the other aches slide, but Erskine is militant about Steve being careful with his heart, even though it’s been a few years since his operation. Steve’s almost ready to believe that Erskine is about to crawl through the woodwork of the counters to start yelling at him for being an irresponsible patient.

“Wanna, uh, talk about it?” Elijah asks, even though he looks supremely uncomfortable at the prospect of being taken up on the offer.

“Nah,” Steve says. The door of the shop jingles in that moment, anyway, heralding the arrival of three loud children running circles around their very tired caretaker, and reminding them both what they do and don’t have time for, and talking about feelings is firmly on the don’t list. “Thanks, though.”

~*~

Dr. Erskine - or, as Steve has called him for most of his adult life, Erskine, because he’d never been able to say Abraham - is a short, bearded man who doesn’t usually wear a disapproving expression, but always endeavours to give himself one when he sees Steve unexpectedly. Steve appreciates the effort, but at the same time one has to acknowledge that Erskine’s effort doesn’t translate very effectively to fierceness, even if he’s improved since retiring from general medical practice and starting to deal with small children in his new capacity of a family doctor.

“Steven,” he says, attempting to wear that valiantly disapproving expression, once Steve has been given the all-clear from the receptionist to head into his office. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“It’s - well, I don’t know what it is,” Steve says. “I’ve been getting aches and pains in seemingly random places -”

“Why Steven, I believe we might make a responsible patient out of you yet,” Erskine murmurs.

“Well, uh,” Steve prevaricates, and Erskine sighs the sigh of the longsuffering.

“How long?”

“A few weeks, I guess,” Steve says sheepishly. It’s already, somehow, been a few days since the first aching chest pains, probably because Steve had put off the visit by making an actual appointment and getting slotted in with other patients instead of strolling in as Erskine was so fond of telling his regulars to do, much to the disapproval of his overworked secretary

“And what made you finally pay me a visit?”

“Um,” Steve says, and winces slightly in advance, “my heart?”

“ _Steve_ ,” Erskine says immediately, and for all that he winced in advance Steve can’t help repeating the movement at the clear disapproval in Erskine’s voice. “If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand times, you never wait until it gets that bad -” He bustles around the room as he talks, gathering what he needs from drawers and trays and beckoning Steve to sit up and take his shirt off.

Hands on his body is, fortunately or unfortunately, a familiar sensation to Steve. Erskine’s touch is, at least, light and well-practiced, the almost inevitable consequence of having been Steve’s doctor for years.

“If I didn’t know you as I do -” Erskine starts. Steve cracks a dry grin.

“That bad?”

“I’d almost be willing to say you’re making something out of nothing,” he says, eyebrows drawn together. “Nothing seems to be wrong.”

“Aside from the usual things,” Steve says, and a smile breaks through the worried wrinkles that’ve gothered next to Erskine’s mouth.

“Yes, aside from the usual things,” he acknowledges. “But there should be something more than that to get you to visit me, of all people.”

“Hey now,” Steve protests. “I enjoy your company.”

“As I enjoy yours,” Erskine says, and straightens. “I’m going to take some blood and refer you to get some scans done, okay?”

Steve grunts his assent. It’s not as though his days are filled with activity. 

“Any recent stressors?” Erskine asks, making conversation as is his habit while he draws blood.

“Well, the whole - SHIELD thing, for one,” Steve says. And, wow, letting himself think about that is a mistake because it’s enough to make his mouth turn down and his spine shiver, a little, under the weight of still-recent anger and self-recrimination and grief, not to mention the jumbled expanse of new emotion that Sharon’s announcement of a new SHIELD has brought up.

“Ah,” Erskine says. “I heard about that, on the news. That is...very likely related to this, then. Have you thought about a therapist?”

“No,” Steve says. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Well, think about it,” Erskine says. His authoritative voice is not particularly authoritative, but Steve listens to it. It takes him about three seconds of thinking before he realises that, on minimum wage and with his terrible insurance, he doesn’t have the slightest chance of being able to maintain a therapist even if he does contract one with the small pile of savings he’d put aside while he was at SHIELD.

By the time Erskine lets Steve go, afternoon sun is slanting across the street and Steve has an appointment at a radiologist’s in three days’ time. As ever, Steve is only allowed to pay a reduced minimum fee, and told to make up the rest of the payment with thanks and by not being an idiot with his body, in those words. He can only be grateful that his third-grade self, stuck in an on-call room waiting for his ma to finish her shift in the ER, had been shameless enough to corral an older gentleman with a towel over his head to help him with his very difficult mathematics problem.

The walk home is illuminated by gentle sunlight and characterised by a cool breeze. It’d be downright relaxing if Steve wasn’t so caught up in his own thoughts, in wondering why there hadn’t appeared to be anything wrong with him, what Erskine might find in his bloodwork, what the radiologist might find in his scans. A therapist is seeming like a better idea by the minute, never mind that he doesn’t have the money for it.

~*~

Sharon’s in the living room when Steve lets himself in, evening darkness greeting him through the window.

“Where were you? Your shift doesn’t go this late,” she says, and her forehead is furrowed, eyebrows drawn together.

Steve is very tempted, for a moment, to make some acerbic comment, but he’s tired and he doesn’t like fighting with Sharon. He shrugs. “Erskine’s,” he says. “I’ve been achy all over recently,” he adds, to forestall Sharon’s inevitable questions. “And on shift today it was in the heart area, so.”

“Oh,” Sharon says. “Oh, no.” They’d started living together just after his first heart operation, so she’d very vividly been able to see the aftermath of it on him, even though he’d been declared fit to leave the hospital. “Are you - did he?”

“Nah,” Steve says. “Says everything looks fine, actually, so I’m just,” he waves the appointment papers around, “waiting on the radiologist’s appointment.”

“How long?”

“Three days,” Steve says, and when Sharon pats the seat on the sofa next to her he accepts the invitation. “I thought we were fighting,” he says, even as he takes off his shoes and sits down next to Sharon, and she doesn’t move away.

“I overreacted,” Sharon says, earnest and steady, meeting Steve’s gaze and holding it. “It’s not my call to make you go back, especially after - everything that happened. Even if I’d like you there,” she adds, maybe a little wistfully. “It’s not the same without you. Um,” she says then. “This is an apology, by the way. I meant to start with that.”

Steve knows what Sharon looks like when she’s lying - she’s practiced her undercover personas on him, for fuck’s sake - and this isn’t that. It’s enough to get him to unbend, to say, “I overreacted too. They weren’t all Nazis, at least. And we were doing good work. Trying.”

“And enjoying our jobs,” Sharon says, soft.

“And that,” Steve acknowledges. “But - it’s a family thing too, isn’t it?” It might not precisely be wise to bring that up now, when it looks like they’re just patching things up, but he plows ahead anyway, waits expectantly for an answer.

Sharon frowns a little, but she doesn’t deny it. “I - yeah,” Sharon admits. She’d been ambitious from the start, with the skill and work ethic to back it up, and her results both in training and the field had always reflected that. It was easy to chalk it up to some kind of natural talent or family aptitude for espionage, even easier to see it as trying to overcompensate for an impossible-to-beat aunt. But Sharon’s attachment to SHIELD was different: she loved SHIELD, loved the work she did there, and she loves her aunt. Anything that hurt any of those would hurt her deeply, and unfortunately HYDRA had successfully wounded all three of them. “I didn’t - I mean, it’s so unprofessional, being so attached, but like - SHIELD’s more than - to me, it’s Aunt Peggy’s legacy, maybe more than it’s an organisation. I hate - I hate what they did to it. I _hate_ what they did to Captain America. She hates it, too.”

Steve’s mouth twists a little at that, letting sympathy and empathy and a whole host of other emotions swirl unhappily through him. It’s one thing for him to hate what’s happened to SHIELD - and he does hate it, he hates it with a passion every time he stops to think about it, which is why he tries not to do that - but Sharon and Peggy would be feeling everything he feels and more.

“I think - I think I owe you another apology, too,” Sharon says. “You just - I mean, it’s not surprising that you’d handle things better than me, but I got angry about it anyway. You were so calm -”

“I’m angry!” Steve exclaims. “I’m so angry, Sharon. I lie awake at night and my mind just keeps going over all the missions I handled and wondering how many were lies and how much I did for them until I want to punch something. But most of the time I can just -” he shrugs, not quite sure what to say. Sharon nods.

“I think I’ve just about reached that stage,” she says. “Or maybe I did, and then I got the invitation to go back, and now everything’s confusing. I just know I want to, but I’m still - I don’t want them to be Nazis again,” she admits, her voice small.

Steve reaches out, squeezes her hand. “You’ve got the chance to make it that way,” he says. “You can do that, now.”

“Yeah,” Sharon says, and it’s kind of impossible to miss the way her entire body sort of softens, at that thought, at that possibility. “Yeah, we can do that. We’re trying, Steve.”

“Tell me about new SHIELD, then,” Steve says, something like an olive branch. “You met them today, right?”

“Yeah,” Sharon says. “It’s a small group. Like, a really small group. Most of the agents who weren’t HYDRA were - well, like you. Once bitten, and all that.”

“I mean - you know, I sympathise,” Steve says. “How could I not?”

“I know,” Sharon says. “So the ones we’ve still got are just, y’know, the ones with no lives. Coulson and the Cavalry and a bunch of scientists who don’t actually care where their money comes from as long as they get to do their research.”

“And you,” Steve points out, making sure to keep his body language open and his nudge gentle.

Sharon snorts. “And me,” she says ruefully. Steve bites his lip and tries to ignore the voice in his head that’s saying _but what are they doing, tell me more, what missions are they running, how, why?_ He’s been bitten, he tries to remind himself sharply. The voice quietens, but he doesn’t trust that. It’s probably a ploy. It’s probably not a coincidence that he’s starting to feel a headache coming on.

Sharon nudges him anyway. “Come on, I know you want to ask,” she says, and that’s all it takes before the metaphorical dam breaks.

“I’m just - curious,” Steve says lamely. “What are you doing, what missions, how why. What happened to the old stuff we had waiting in the wings. Are you sure none of them are Nazis. The good stuff.”

“Sounds like you’re a bit more invested than curious,” Sharon says, and her voice is purposefully, obviously mild, which, no, that’s not a thought Steve can handle.

“I’ve been _bitten_ , Sharon,” he says, and it comes out more plaintive than he’d wanted.

“So have I, asshole,” Sharon says. “But you can come back and help make it better, if you want to.”

Steve just scoffs, tries to act - tries to _be_ \- unaffected by the conversation, no matter how unappealing his coffee shop is rapidly growing to be. “Just keep me updated,” he says, forcefully flippant.

“Hey,” Sharon says, “are you okay?” which is when Steve realises that the beginnings of his headache have spiralled and blossomed into a full-blown migraine and that he’s clenching his teeth so hard that the creaking of enamel is audible.

“Fine,” he mutters. He should probably work on not tuning pain out to this extent. His jaw aches from the strain he’d put it under. “Headache.”

“Ibuprofen?” Sharon asks, muscles tensing in preparation, as though she’s going to make a run for it.

“Nah, I’ll take the migraine meds for this one,” Steve says. They’re in the bathroom cabinet, but naturally he has to dig around for what seems like a solid few minutes before he finds the orange container. “Course they’d only be two left,” he calls out to Sharon. As far as attempts to reassure her go, he’s done better, but he’s certainly also done worse.

And then Steve blinks, and it seems like not even a second later the pressure and accompanying pain both lift, but somehow when he opens his eyes he’s - somewhere else. 

“What the fuck?” he mutters. The room around him is nearly as tiny as his own flat and Sharon’s pretty clearly not here, even though the room is sparse enough to make hiding see impossible. “Sharon, is this some kind of prank?” he asks anyway, turning around to try and take stock of his surroundings. The walls are painted an ugly greyish colour that suggests it was originally white, and as Steve twists his head he can see a discoloured armchair with a distinctly concave cushion, an empty bookshelf, and a small pile of bricks: nowhere that’d make a particularly good hiding place even for a rather small woman.

There’s a window in front of him, but it has to be some kind of trick window, because the sky is lightening through it, as though it’s morning, and Steve’s been talking to Sharon for a while, sure, but not that long.

“Who’re you?” a rough voice says, directly behind Steve and sudden enough to make him jump.

“Who’re _you_?” he snaps back immediately, hackles rising even as he twists frantically to see who’d spoken.

Directly behind him, there’s a mussed mattress and a pile of dirty clothes - which, embarrassingly, upon further inspection turns out to be a man, crouched against the wall and cradling a small notebook on his lap. His hair is long and looks kind of greasy around the baseball cap that’s pulled down low over his head, obscuring his features.

“I’m James,” the man says. He shifts, and something about the movement seems to trigger some kind of structural collapse in the pile of clothes around him, because the next thing Steve knows James’s shape has grown much more distinct, lean lines against the wall behind him.

“James,” Steve repeats dumbly.

“You’re - also James?” His uncertain frown is audible.

“No!” Steve says. “I’m Steve. Rogers,” he adds. James nods at this, but doesn’t offer his own last name. Steve just stares, finding himself at an utter loss as to how to proceed from here.

James is the one to break the brief, awkward silence with, “How’d you appear here?”

“ _Appear_ here?” Steve asks, sitting down so that he’s at a level with James, even if that doesn’t do much to reveal his features. Appear is a strange choice of words. They haven’t invented teleportation yet, as far as he knows.

“Appear,” James confirms, insistent. “One second I’m alone, the next -” he gestures to Steve a brief sweep up and down of his arm.

And, idiot that he is, Steve only starts to realise what has happened to him then. He can’t control the bubble of hope that rises desperately in his chest against his better judgement, warm and light and almost suffocating. “I just - appeared?” he asks, and James’s eyebrows raise a little, probably at the sudden animation in Steve’s tone.

“Yes,” he says, a little doubt creeping into his tone, but Steve tunes him out after that, diving into his own mind with vigour, trying -

It only takes a moment. Steve doesn’t even know how he didn’t notice it before, but - the thin string in his mind has lengthened and thickened and moved forward, and it’s the most thrillingly indescribably sensation, to seize it and sing down its end. James could be - might be - Steve’s _soulmate_ , maybe, possibly, if Steve is truly lucky enough.

James stiffens, straightens. “Is that…?” he starts, voice soft and tentative. Very gently, a shy tug comes from his side of the bond, and Steve’s cheeks hurt from the width and the force of his smile. Soulmate, soulmate, soulmate, his mind repeats, over and over, its new giddy favourite mantra.

“Yes,” Steve breathes, and reaches out, almost helplessly. He wants to throw himself forward until he can hug his soulmate properly, but -

But James is still sitting against the wall, and he is stiff and uneasy. “Are - are you okay?” Steve asks, and for a moment he’s afraid that James hasn’t heard the question, the other man stays so still and silent. Then he shakes his head, a jerky, uncoordinated motion.

“I can’t,” James says, and his voice is even rougher than it’d been when he’d spoken his first words to Steve. “You can’t - I’m sorry -”

The next thing Steve knows is a firm grip around his upper arms and a gentle but firm push through a wall. It’s technically possible, since Steve’s not exactly here, not with his soulmate in a physical body - his body’s back in his flat with Sharon, and his being wherever here is resembles a shared hallucination. The thing is, though, that brains aren’t built for the strange in-betweenness of being stepped out to see a soulmate. Brains are not built to try and comprehend being pushed through a wall during an out-of-body experience, and as though to underscore the point Steve’s whole entire head feels like it’s throbbing with confusion.

He understands why being broken out of step with your soulmate is called splintering now, at least. His feels as though his brain’s being split into pieces trying to make sense of being pushed through a wall.

Steve thinks he hears James - his soulmate, his soulmate, and what is his soulmate doing - saying, “I’m sorry,” one more time, but he can’t be sure over the unsteady beat of blood through his head.

“Ow,” he manages to push out of his chest, once he feels like he has a functioning mouth again. “Ow, ow, _fuck_.”

“Oh no,” a sympathetic voice says from behind him. “Splintered?”

“Yeah,” Steve drags out of himself. That is, he thinks he manages to drag the word out. He’s not quite sure. His mouth may not be his mouth, yet.

“Aw, that’s the worst feeling, especially the first time,” Sharon says. “You’ll get more used to it, I promise,” she adds, and Steve thinks he registers footsteps before, all of a sudden, there are hands on his shoulders, on his back.

“I remember that,” he mumbles. Years ago, when Sharon had starting falling in step with her soulmate on a regular basis, she’d started pushing the boundaries of what she could do while she was stepped out, like the hopelessly methodical field agent she is, and when she inevitably started groaning after being splintered, Steve learned pretty quickly that the best way to shut her up was by rubbing her down. He’d thought it was akin to rubbing down a horse, making sure they were calm, but now that he’s on the receiving end it’s not that at all: hands on him are grounding, relaxing, and the touch helps his brain remember where it is and the actual solid body that it inhabits.

“Thanks,” he says, once his head feels slightly less like it’s being stomped on by an army.

“That was what I thought it was, right?” Sharon asks. Now that Steve is more in control of his senses he can feel the coiled-up excited energy in her hands, and the way that she is trying and mostly failing to keep her voice even and calm, just in case she’s wrong.

“If you mean stepping out...” Steve starts coyly, even going so far as to duck his head as he trails off and getting a slap on the shoulder for his trouble. “Yeah,” he admits, and can’t help the smile that bursts over his face. “Yeah, it was, Sharon. I stepped out. I -” he breaks off, takes a breath. He’s not sure whether he can finish the sentence. It feels as though saying it will jinx it.

Sharon, on the other hand, has no such compunctions. “I can’t believe it,” she says. “You have a soulmate!” She grabs Steve’s hand, and the grin that curls the corners of Steve’s mouth at her words is entirely involuntary and entirely welcome. When Sharon says it, when someone else says it, the situation feels real. Acknowledged.

“I do,” he says, and whatever might have happened with James doesn’t stop the giddiness rising up inside Steve or the way he compulsively checks at the soul-bond in his mind. It’s still there, still alive and vital and real. “I have a soulmate,” Steve breathes out, clutching at it. It’s good to hear and even better to say. “Sharon!” he says, grabbing her wrist and squeezing for lack of something else to do. “I have a _soulmate_!” She squeezes right back, wordless and, if the grin on her face is anything to go by, glad.

“Okay,” she says. “So let me guess. You got so excited that you ran through a wall.”

Steve snorts. “I wish,” he says. “It was - uh, it was my soulmate.”

Sharon raises her eyebrows. “Your _soulmate_ got so excited that they pushed you through a wall?” she asks, and then snorts. “I can see that.”

“Wrong again,” Steve says. “He, um, did it on purpose. I think.”

“On purpose?” Sharon repeats, like she doesn’t quite comprehend this. To be fair, it is an unusual situation. Not many soulmates would splinter the other half of their pair, after all. “On _purpose_?“

“He said ‘I can’t’ and ‘I’m sorry’ and then he pushed me through a wall,” Steve provides. “Hence the fucking headache.”

“What an asshole?” Sharon says, and even though her tone raises to make it a question it’s equal parts insulting and endearing: that’s Steve’s _soulmate_ she’s insulting, but it’s also Steve’s soulmate she’s willing to square off against for his sake.

“He wasn’t - I mean, he didn’t -” Steve says, in an incoherent attempt to justify his soulmate. “I mean, he looked pretty bad, Sharon.”

“Bad how?” Sharon asks, immediately suspicious. “Bad shady? Bad HYDRA -?”

“No!” Steve exclaims, thoroughly indignant on his soulmate’s behalf, nevermind the fact that he’s only known his soulmate for a few minutes. “Bad like, hasn’t showered in a while, circles under the eyes, could’ve been mistaken for a pile of dirty laundry bad.”

“Could’ve?” Sharon repeats. “You thought your soulmate was a pile of laundry?”

“Oh my god,” Steve mutters, as Sharon dissolves into peals of laughter at the tacit admission. “That’s not the important thing here. That wasn’t the point. Sharon, stop laughing.” If she ever met James she was definitely going to tell him this. Steve could already tell he was never going to live it down.


	2. Chapter 2

Having a bond is - it’s the strangest sensation. There isn’t a way to describe it except as simply _being there_ , where before there’d been blank emptiness. At this distance the bond is nothing more than reassuring presence - it takes physical proximity or falling in step to be able to feel emotions through a bond - but for all that Steve’s never even had this much before, and his focus keeps returning to the trailing end of the bond in his head. He feels like he’s grown a new finger, a new toe, and just as he would be fascinated with a new digit he’s intensely preoccupied with his bond: checking on it, tugging gently, making sure it hasn’t disappeared on him, wasn’t a dream. When he lets himself get lost in his bond he could swear that it glows golden, suffusing solidly through his mind.

He can’t draw the sensation of a bond but he can draw his soulmate, so that’s what he does, over and over, the shape of him slumped against the wall, the hypotheticals: what he might look like without the pile of clothes around him, what he might look like if he’d looked up, if he’d smiled. He wouldn’t describe it as an obsession, but Sharon might.

  


“Is this him again?” she demands, holding up an NDA from SHIELD that she’s supposed to sign. Steve’s doodle of his soulmate overlaps what is probably a few important clauses. “Why can’t you draw anything more than this position?”

“I didn’t see anything more than this position,” Steve says snippily, grabbing the paper protectively. “Artists need references, you know.” Sharon raises an eyebrow at him, and, well, this is an important thing that she needs to sign. He passes it back to her reluctantly and, his movements slow and dragging, passes an eraser along with it.

“It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that you don’t have the slightest idea of what this guy looks like,” she says as she ruthlessly rubs James’s image off her contract, so Steve isn’t terribly inclined to take her seriously. “I don’t think I’ve seen a single definite feature in any of your drawings.”

“He splintered me before I could look at him properly,” Steve says, and Sharon raises her eyebrows again.

“I thought you’d be more upset about that,” she says. “I’d be pretty angry. If, you know, it happened to me.”

“He’s getting himself together,” Steve says, with slightly more confidence than he feels. “And we’re soulmates, officially. I - we’ll meet again, we have to. And then I can convince him we’ll be good together.”

That makes Sharon laugh, her face clearing. “Oh, there it is. That trademark Steve stubbornness. James isn’t going to know what hit him, huh?”

“He’ll know perfectly well it was me, because I will telegraph every single one of my intentions,” Steve retorts. “And I won’t _hit_ him,” he mutters, even though Sharon hadn’t meant that kind of hitting and he knew it. Not having a soulmate only served to make those rare inter-soulmate abuse cases even harder to stomach; he’s going to fucking treasure what he’s allowed, what he thought he’d never get.

“That’s the spirit,” Sharon says approvingly as she picks up her newest project. She’s trying to crochet a scarf, because crochet is apparently a completely different discipline to knitting and thus utterly achievable even though her attempt at that had ended in a ruined ball of yarn and two snapped knitting needles.

“Can you trigger a stepping out?” Steve asks as he watches Sharon struggle to fit the curved end of her hook into her yarn.

“No,” she says, immediate and disappointing. “You can block them as needed, but -”

“I’m not going to block James out,” Steve says. He can’t help but to be mildly insulted at the suggestion even though he knows it wasn’t really a suggestion, so to speak, just a fact.

“- you can’t induce them,” Sharon finishes.

“Okay,” Steve says, “but what if you could?”

“Just wait it out,” Sharon advises, like that is at all helpful. Steve will die of impatience before he falls into step with his soulmate again, probably.

“Okay,” Steve says again, “but consider this: I really, really want to step out right now.”

Sharon sighs. “Your brain doesn’t care. It literally does not care,” she tries, but the tone of her words is resigned to whatever Steve comes up with next, which is gratifying.

“That’s unfair,” Steve muttes. “I take care of the thing. Can’t I at least optimise my chances?”

Sharon stares at him for a long moment and accidentally stabs her yarn so hard that it snaps. “Let’s compromise like adults,” she says. “Let’s Google it.”

“Oh, because Google has always been so reliable,” Steve snorts, but he goes to grab his laptop anyway.

The first article of his Google search tells him it’s not possible to induce a step in or step out or any kind of falling in step with his soulmate. The second one is sponsored by what is undoubtedly a trustworthy pharmaceutical company and tells him to buy three types of pills, an ointment, and a bottle of liquid medicine. The third one repeats the first.

Steve changes his inquiry from _can you fall in step on purpose_ to _how to fall in step on purpose_.

The results change after that, and not necessarily in the way Steve wants: gone are the tasteful white-and-green of vaguely official healthcare sources, and in come the thoroughly reliable lifestyle blogs and Yahoo Answers. Which, Steve would be more willing to take advice from them if any two blogs would actually offer the same advice: acupuncture, identical schedules, transcendental meditation, and symbolic gifts mailed to one another are all touted as their own form of magic that will bind soulmates closer together, or something. Steve knows perfectly well that he is not going to do any of this, but he still can’t help but spend a second wondering whether it’d be possible for him to be stabbed with needles, in sync with James, while meditating transcendentally and clutching a symbolic gift James had sent him.

“Did you even check Google Scholar?” Sharon asks after she peeks over at his page and pulls a face at the picture of someone having their ear candled in the name of falling in step. “I know you, you never look at Google Scholar.”

“I -” Steve starts, and Sharon quells his protests by starting to speak.

“Soulmates and their bonds have long been the subject of academic research, blah blah, the bonds and experiences of two thousand participants were tested, whatever, methodology -”

“What’s the point of reading it if you skip all the important bits?” Steve grumbles.

“And they found,” Sharon says louder, “that soulmates tended to fall in step in times of great happiness or sadness -”

“So I need to trigger a bout of fucking depression?”

“- but otherwise stuck to the traditionally established pattern.”

Steve’s eyes widen and he thinks his mouth hangs a little open, at those words. His chest feels cold and unhappy. When Sharon looks up she frowns, leans forward. “What’s wrong? Are you -”

“I forgot about the traditional pattern,” Steve says through numb lips, and slumps into a couch cushion. One of Sharon’s tiny annoying wood shavings emerges from the fluff to dig into his brow bone, a piercing point of sensation.

“Oh fuck,” he hears Sharon say. “Me too. You don’t really think -?”

Soulmates met in gradually increasing increments. A first falling in step tended to happen when the younger partner was around age six; it was fairly common for the pair to fall in step once more about four years later, and then three, and then two and then one and then half a year, and so on and so forth until the pair either met physically or, at around 17, were meeting regularly with intervals of about three to five days.

Steve will _definitely_ die of impatience if his cycle with James tries to start now. He doesn’t have anywhere near the patience required to wait four years before seeing his soulmate again.

When he lifts his head, of course the first thing his eyes spring to are the drawings of James he’s piled onto the table. His own pencil strokes seem to taunt him; he can’t believe that he got to meet his soulmate and all he saw was a fucking hat and some dirty clothes.

“Hey,” Sharon says, gentle. She doesn’t seem to have much to say after that, only said it in the first place to bring Steve back to where he is.

“Does the study have anything to say about late bond formation?” Steve asks, and Sharon’s face says what she doesn’t want to. Steve shifts his gaze back to the unaffected couch.

“Late bonds in this paper are bonds manifesting at eight and nine years old, though,” Sharon says. “You’re - there’s nothing like you in here.”

“I don’t know if there’s anything like me in the world,” Steve says, giving in briefly to the overwhelming moroseness. He picks at the corner of the couch and a thread comes free, unravelling rapidly. He has to actively avoid making an angsty comparison about how his entire life feels like it’s unravelling.

“Well, your soulmate,” Sharon says, infuriatingly calm. “There’s definitely one other person like you in the world. And, y’know, where there’s one there’s usually more, and all that.”

“Right,” Steve says sourly. Then he forces himself to straighten, to shake his head and try to appreciate Sharon’s ruthless, fact-based strategy of cheering people up. “No, you’re right. I’ll - do more research, or something.” He’d researched the topic almost frantically when he was younger, trying to figure out what was wrong with him, but then he’d avoided it entirely, two different coping mechanisms. It seemed like it was time to re-immerse himself in the study of soulmates.

“Don’t - I mean, do what you want,” Sharon says, voice unexpectedly low and nervous. “But don’t - obsess over it. You’re both adults, it really might just take a few days. You might meet him again in three to five, like normal.”

Her nervousness makes sense, because it’d be so easy and probably somewhat justified for Steve to snap at her: it was easy for her to say that, after all, no matter how trite a comeback the phrase is. But that nervousness is also what makes him bite his lip and nod. She wants what’s best for him, he knows that, and this is a situation that’s firmly out of their comfort zones. They’re both floundering here, and all Sharon’s trying to do is make him feel better.

“I’m going to try my hand at transcendental meditation,” Steve decides. He can’t just do nothing, and if it’d worked for someone -

Well. It probably wasn’t going to work, but maybe. And, more relevantly, it’ll keep Steve at least somewhat occupied.

A sceptical “Really?” pops out of Sharon’s mouth before she can suppress it.

“I have to try _something_ ,” Steve says, with more desperation in his tone than either of them are strictly comfortable with; Sharon shifts and looks away. “And it’s not like I can just casually take up acupuncture.” The other two items on the list require soulmate participation, and funnily enough Steve doesn’t think he’s quite in the position to get James to do anything. Fuck, but he should’ve gotten a phone number. An email address. If he’d just gotten something, anything, they might already be in touch, sending off an email or on an international call or video-chatting or _something_.

Instead, here he is: back in his body, back in his apartment, and feeling thoroughly lost at sea.

~*~

Shockingly, transcendental meditation does not seem to work. To be fair, this is not much of a surprise to Steve; he does know better than to trust random bloggers on the internet whose tips and tricks go against a mostly scientifically proven norm. Then again, he never feels particularly transcendent during his transcendental meditation, so he supposes he can’t exactly rule the method out completely.

He’s not sure whether he truly believes that his bond can snap into normality after so many years of absence, but - he’s _hopeful_ , okay? Three days pass, and Steve begins to hope against the odds - _surely_ it’s not going to take years - and anticipate a falling in step. Four days and he’s nervous. Five and he’s mostly resigned to the idea that it’s not going to happen in the normal three to five day span of a normal, fully formed adult bond, because when has anything about his bond ever been normal? He starts trying to resign himself to the idea of years until he sees his soulmate again, with marginal success.

Then the end of the fifth day comes, and Steve - he’d been hopeful, he’d known that, and yet the depth of his disappointment would suggest that he’d been a lot more hopeful than even he thought. It was as though a bit of hope had tucked itself away, carved out a little space in his heart, and now that it’s shrivelling with disappointment it’s taking his entire chest with it. He stares up at his ceiling and utterly fails to turn his brain off, turns over onto his stomach and continues to fail. If anything, the lack of visual stimuli - given that his face is stuck in a pillow - just makes his brain more anxiously active, trying to think about where he’ll be in four years’ time. The thing was that four years was a long time to be alone when it _didn’t have to be that way_ , and James hadn’t looked to be in particularly good shape - Steve squeezes his eyes shut. He’s not going to think about that.

His glasses, as always, pinch at his nose when he lies face down. It’s not often that he flat out does not care, but this is one of those occasions, and reasonably so, he thinks. He’d picked up the evening shift in an attempt to distract himself but that backfired, he contemplated morosely, because now he’s tired and twice as sad, feeling everything at once.

He doesn’t even realise he’s falling asleep until his heart jumps at a flash of light and he hears a whispered, “Oh shit,” from Sharon. “Steve?” she asks tentatively a second later, a whisper threading through the once-again dark room. “Did I wake you? Were you sleeping?”

“Yeah and yeah,” Steve says, and drags himself into a somewhat upright position. “S’probably a good thing you did though. I just came off shift and crashed and this couch is shitty for my back.”

“It’s been five days,” Sharon says, shades of accusation in her tone. She’d get more points for being perceptive if she hadn’t witnessed Steve worry his way through the second, third, and fourth days.

“Yes,” Steve says. Sharon, apparently deciding that he’s awake enough, turns the light back on and Steve winces, rubbing at the side of his mouth and the indents on his nose. His hearing aids pull uncomfortably at the shells of his ears, reminding him that they’re present and accounted for as well, so he reaches up and snaps them out with probably less care than is advisable.

“It’s going to be okay,” Sharon says, and starts chivvying him to bed. “Things always look better in the mornings.”

“That’s ‘cause you can’t see a fucking thing at night,” Steve grumbles, but he obediently heads towards his bed.

“Don’t get smart with me,” Sharon says, giving off such strong mother-hen vibes that Steve almost thinks she’s going to come and tuck him in. She hovers in the doorway instead, watches him with sharp worried eyes as he pulls blankets over himself. “Night, Steve. Sorry again for waking you.”

“Night,” Steve mumbles, and turns to his wall and tries not to think.

So, well. After the fifth day Steve stops counting. Numbers are a lot of unnecessary effort anyway, and counting things was so monotonous, especially given that it took 24 hours to add just one to the number in his head.

It wasn’t worth the trouble to keep up the counting and constantly be worrying about how weak their bond must still be, to be unable to facilitate meetings between them yet. The fact that he constantly knows which day it is anyway? That’s coincidence, pure and simple. The fact that Steve knows it’s been six days when he goes in for his scans and ten days when he gets his results back and they say nothing’s wrong with him despite his symptoms, that he’s physically in what might be the best health of his life - that’s coincidence. The fact that he knows it’s been fifteen days when he finally, _finally_ steps out for a second time - that’s also coincidence. Clearly.

“James,” is the first thing out of his mouth when he realises what’s happened. His voice is a fairly embarrassing breathy exhale but that’s okay, he’s stepped out, he’s got another chance, a second chance, and he hasn’t had to wait years for it, has barely had to wait a fraction of that. The gratefulness that wells up in him then feels like it just about stops his heart.

“Steve,” he soulmate’s voice says. Steve’s head whips in the direction it’d come from, and he can’t quite manage to keep the grin off his face upon seeing his soulmate. James is completely covered, combat boots and gloves and a baseball cap pulled low over his face for all that he’s indoors, the same dirty jacket is wrapped around his broad ( _very_ broad, Steve notices, help) shoulders, but for once Steve’s short stature works to his advantage: if he gets just a little closer he’ll be able to look up into his soulmate’s face.

James doesn’t make another move, so Steve puts this haphazard plan into action, stepping forward in increments until James’s face is slowly revealed from under the low visor of the baseball cap: a strong jawline, on his first small step, patchy with stubble and what visible skin there is scattered with with a nervous shaver’s nicks and cuts. The second step gives Steve’s greedy eyes too-red lips, thin and bitten; the third step reveals a straight nose, the fourth a pair of downcast eyes ringed in dark circles. Steve’s fifth steps brings those eyes flicking up at him, and Steve’s soulmate has blue eyes, the most beautiful blue eyes.

“Hi,” Steve says dumbly.

“I thought - I said -” James says, “I thought I said I can’t. And you shouldn’t. And - what I meant was, don’t come back.”

“I can’t help it,” Steve says, “I can’t. We’re - we’re -” he stutters, trailing off. He can’t quite bring himself to say it, to this man who seems so shy of the prospect.

“Soulmates,” James says, something tentative about the word. “Right?”

“Yeah, um. Yeah,” Steve says. He can feel blood rising in his cheeks. “We’re soulmates.”

“I can’t,” James says, and there’s genuine pain on his face. Steve wants to reach up and wipe it off. “I can’t be a soulmate. You should go.”

“I don’t want to go,” Steve protests. It’s the first thing that comes to mind. His dumb rational brain finally catches up to what’s happening and tries to make sense of this situation, of where his soulmate is.

The sky’s dark here, which - puts James a bunch of hours ahead of Steve. He can’t do the maths. It’s cold, which means Northern hemisphere, probably. There’s a cityscape outside the window that Steve doesn’t recognise, but he might be able to draw it from memory if he’s quick enough, if he steps back into his own body soon and without a splintering headache.

“I can’t be a soulmate,” James repeats, like this will change the fact that he is one.

“I might be unhealthy but I’m not that bad -”

“It’s _me_ ,” his soulmate says, his tone almost insulted. “I wouldn’t -” he cuts himself off, takes a breath. “I wouldn’t be good for you,” he finishes, softer.

Steve - melts. There’s no other word for it, really. “You’re my soulmate, James,” he says. The words come out aggressively, for all that Steve is soft inside, because he needs James to understand this, to believe it. “You’re my soulmate - you - the fact that you’re worried about it - we’ll work it out,” he settles on, desperately. “We’ll work things out.” When he steps forward just a little more their bodies are almost touching. All Steve would have to do is sway forward, just a little - he wouldn’t touch James, not without permission, but it’s a little thrilling all the same, to be so close to him. A lot thrilling, even.

Their eyes meet, and for a moment the two of them stand frozen in place, suspended in a moment that stretches out like a scoop of honey. Steve could easily believe that the rest of the world no longer existed, like this, everything in his focus narrowed down to him and James. Him and his soulmate.

Then the moment breaks, somehow, and James shies backwards. His fumbling gloved hands pull his cap down as though it’ll help him remain an unknown, as though it’ll make Steve forget his soulmate’s features, until it’s a small miracle that he can still see what he’s doing, his visor is so deep in the way.

“You should go,” he says, and when Steve doesn’t move James is the one to come closer, moving as though to grab Steve. Steve’s soulmate moves in the same fluid way that Sharon and her group of field agent friends do, which is an interesting thought for Steve to think about until their next falling in step.

For the moment, though - he wasn’t a SHIELD agent for nothing, and even if he doesn’t have the physical aptitude needed to be a true force to be reckoned with he can dodge passably well, and does so. Of course, with the way that both of them pivot towards each other again, and the way that Steve had dodged under James’s arm - it means they’re close together. It means that all Steve has to do is wobble a little before they’re pressed close together, their bodies in contact, shoulder to hip.

Steve won’t admit it, not while his soulmate is still stuck thinking that the two of them need to be apart, but pressed against his soulmate is an exceedingly nice place to be. He might go so far as to describe it as beautiful, if he were to describe it, and if they were pressed together for - different reasons. Less combative and more - well, compromising.

James stills as well, the surprise or the shock or something else rendering him motionless. Steve can see the window from under James’s arm, and tries to commit the cityscape in front of him to memory.

“Where are you?” he asks to cover his tracks, because James seems exactly paranoid enough to move out of the country if he thought Steve knew where he was. “Let me come to you, please - give me a phone number, an email, something -”

“No,” James says. “No, don’t come back. Don’t do that. Just go, I’m sorry, just -”

Steve thinks he would appreciate those strong hands on him a lot more if they weren’t currently pushing him through a wall, _again_.

His headache, at least, as not as bad this time around. He’s able to groan and rub his own temples to bring himself back down, instead of sitting insensate and waiting for Sharon to do it. Which is good, because Sharon’s at work and so, he remembers abruptly, is he.

“I thought you said you didn’t have a soulmate,” Kamala says, letting herself into the break room. “That sure looked like having a soulmate to me.”

“It’s new,” Steve says. “I - that was the second time.” He knows the expression on his face is probably dopily happy but he refuses to care. It’s been fifteen days. He can handle intervals of fifteen days. Especially if they start to get shorter, as they were documented to do.

“...Huh,” Kamala says, even though she’s quite clearly still confused. “I’m glad it worked out for you, then.”

“Thanks,” Steve says. “Me too, I - oh, fuck!” he interrupts himself to exclaim, rushing over to where they keep the baking paper and grabbing a pencil.

“What -?” Kamala starts to ask, but a customer comes up to the counter at that moment so she turns to shift her attention away from Steve with only a last lingering look at where he’s scribbling.

Steve thinks - he thinks he’s got a passable rendition of what he’d seen, at least. It still looked like nowhere he’d ever seen before, but he was pretty sure the largest points, the tentpole features, were the same.

There’s about a one in a million chance that Kamala will recognise the cityscape but Steve’s perfectly ready to show it to her once she’s explained to the customer that gluten-free food is safe for people with Coeliac’s Disease. Which is to say, he’s perfectly ready for about three seconds and then he realises, looking down at the messily outlined building shapes on baking paper, that he can draw his soulmate’s face now. His soulmate’s absurdly good-looking face, which will be infinitely harder to forget, and easier to look for than a generic skyline to boot.

When Kamala finally convinces their well-meaning but utterly confused customer that their gluten-free apple muffins are safe for her sister with Coeliac’s, Steve is already in the break room, scribbling out his soulmate’s face as though their lives depend on it.

“Steve!” she hisses.

“What’s going on?” his manager asks, outraged and letting herself into the break room. “What am I running here, an empty store? A ghost counter?”

“Sorry, sorry,” Kamala mutters, heading back out to the counter.

“No, no, it was my fault,” Steve says, trying for an apologetic smile. “I stepped out for a sec.”

“Oh,” his manager says, softening a little. “I guess it was about time,” she adds, and Steve has a bizarre moment of wondering how on Earth she’d known he’d been waiting with bated breath to fall in step with his soulmate again before he realises that all she’s referring to is the fact that he hasn’t stepped out on her after a few months of work. Everybody except him has been in this situation before. The odds of _not_ going through a few months of working without having a shift coincide with a falling in step are pretty damn low. “Still,” his manager adds, successfully glaring him back into the present, “it’s over now, clearly, so you can head back to the machines.”

“Clearly,” Steve mutters under his breath as he heads out to what is essentially an empty shop. He starts rearranging muffins, and lets himself zone out just a little: thinking about the resources he’d once had, about whether he could’ve used them to search for James’s location, James’s face. He doesn’t have much interest in working for SHIELD again, not as they were or really as they are - the break he made was too clean for him to mix himself up now by going back in - but he can’t help but wonder whether it’d be a good idea for him to go back just briefly, just to use their equipment to try and find James, and then to get back out again. The tools he’d have at his disposal at SHIELD are light years ahead of anything he could get his hands on at a civilian, he knows that much, and that much is enough to start tipping the scales.

It’d be - well, it’d be an invasion of privacy, he knows that. But he also knows that if it was up to James the two of them would never see each other again, and that’s - his reasoning is so _wrong_. He’d be a good soulmate to Steve, and Steve would do everything he could to be good right back. He doesn't know what was making James so nervous, so cagey, but whatever it was, Steve’s sure that it’s wrong. He thinks - he’s pretty sure that these are extenuating circumstances, that he’s allowed to play dirty to track his soulmate down and convince him they’d be good together. And if, after all that, James still wants nothing to do with Steve - Steve could accept that, he thinks. If he was sure it was what _James_ wanted, and not something done for Steve.

The important thing, though, was that he could go see James. James couldn’t push him through a wall, in that scenario. The closest he could come would be pushing Steve _against_ a wall, and Steve is fairly sure he wouldn’t object to that.

~*~

“I stepped out again,” is the first thing he says to Sharon when he lets himself into their flat and finds her on the couch. “At work.”

“That’s great!” Sharon says immediately, bless her. “Did he -?”

“Yeah,” Steve has to admit. “He splintered me again but I swear, it took longer this time. And -” he pauses to take a breath, unsure of how to continue, unsure of what he wants to divulge and what he wants to keep clutched to his chest. Especially in the light of the vaguely reproachful look Sharon trying her best not to aim at him. “He - don’t look at me like that, Sharon, he was - so concerned about being a good soulmate. He thinks he can’t be.”

“A good start there would be not throwing your soulmate through walls when the two of you fall in step,” Sharon mutters. “But hey, maybe that’s just me and my old-fashioned ideas.”

“He didn’t throw me,” Steve protests, even though he knows perfectly well that this is not the best point to be protesting. “He pushed very gently. It didn’t even give me much of a headache this time, either.”

“Yes,” Sharon says, unimpressed. “Because that makes it so much better.”

“He’s sorting himself out,” Steve insists. “He - he looked better.” Sharon still looks unimpressed, but at least she accepts this. “And, uh - there was a window, behind him, there was a skyline - and his face -”

“What on Earth -”

“I drew them, is what I’m trying to say,” Steve blurts out. “I drew them, and I - I want to know whether -”

He has to take another breath, then, unsure of what he wants to say. He’s not sure why he’s so nervous, except possibly that this has the potential to lead him to his soulmate. He’s not sure what he might do with the knowledge, what he even _can_ do, but - he’ll _know_.

In Sharon’s defence, she does a good job of smothering her initial unimpressed expression. And, looking down at it now, it’s terribly obvious that both of Steve’s drawings, the face and the landscape, had been hastily sketched on a medium that is not great, not to mention the folds through them where the paper had been crumpled to fit in his pocket.

“Yeah, it’s not…” he says, and then sighs.

“Draw them better and I might be able to get something for you,” Sharon says, which, yeah, Steve can’t really fault her that one.

“Yeah, fair enough,” he says, trying to smooth out the paper so it can serve as some kind of rough reference, later. “And -”

“Spit it out,” Sharon says curiously, watching him.

“I was thinking,” Steve says slowly, “that maybe I could come work for SHIELD again.”

Sharon goes utterly still at the suggestion, too taken by surprise to look the part. “I thought you didn’t like the idea,” she says cautiously, in the same tone of voice one might speak to a person holding a gun at you.

“I didn’t, when you put it to me,” Steve says. “It took me by surprise.”

“How much of this newfound desire to work for SHIELD is to do with using their resources to find your soulmate?” Sharon asks, and Steve has to crack a grin at how well she knows him.

“Quite a lot,” he admits.

“Okay,” Sharon says slowly, “so what if you found him? Would you resign?”

“I -” Steve stutters out, slightly taken aback that Sharon is even entertaining the option. “It’s not like I hate the work. I like it, even,” he says. “But - off the record? I don’t really want to work for SHIELD again.”

“You’ve moved on,” Sharon observes, and Steve shrugs, nods.

“I guess - this might confuse me enough to stay,” Steve admits. “Don’t get me wrong, I really do like the work. It’s just - even the thought of going back feels weird.”

“The things we do for our soulmates,” Sharon says, flashing a grin. When she takes out her phone and starts to tap out a text Steve’s eyebrows feel like they go through the roof; he really hadn’t thought she was going to go for it.

“Don’t tell whoever it is that I’m not sure about staying after finding James,” Steve warns. “I know SHIELD, if you tell them that then you guys won’t even let me touch the facial recognition software for at least six months,” Steve says, and Sharon’s snort is confirmation enough. “SHIELD knows how to squeeze blood out of stone, I swear.”

“You’re not wrong,” Sharon says, as her phone buzzes. And buzzes again, and again, as she looks down at it. “Well,” she says. “Coulson says yes.” Like it can be that easy. As if to underscore the point, her phone buzzes again.

“Sounds like Coulson has a bit more to say than yes,” Steve observes. The very phone seems to be wiggling in excitement.

“You know he likes you,” Sharon says. “He thinks your plans are genius. I’d worry about a bit of a crush, actually, if he wasn’t married.”

“Oh - oh!” Steve realises, remembering in that moment exactly who Coulson is. “That guy? He’s the head of logistics?” In Steve’s defence, the head of logistics had been, under the old SHIELD system, Steve’s boss three time over, or cubed, or something like that. He really had no reason to have expected any interaction with him, especially given how tightly compartmentalised SHIELD was.

“Well, no need to sound so surprised -”

“Don’t tell him I said that, for the love of God,” Steve says, as Sharon’s thumbs start moving. She hesitates, looks up at him, and presses down against the backspace key.

“He’s really a pretty decent agent and logistician when he’s not starstruck,” Sharon says, and Steve would snort, the statement is so absurd - Steve’s 5”7 and 110 pounds and skinnier than a stick for one thing, and he definitely doesn’t have as much experience as Coulson does for another - but Sharon shakes her head, adamant. “He really likes the way you think about things. Didn’t you know that?”

Steve shrugs. “I kind of avoided him,” he admits. “I didn’t know what was up with him.”

“ _Please_ let me tell him that,” Sharon says, and it’s only by virtue of gabbling the question out really fast that she manages to get it all out before Steve’s adamant, “No!” Sharon pouts but listens, as far as Steve can tell. “He says you can come into work as soon as tomorrow,” she says.

“I have to give two weeks’ notice -” Steve starts to protest, but Sharon shakes her head.

“We can take care of that,” she says, and, well, Steve believes her. “Just say the word.”

He pauses, tempted, but as much as he might complain about his coffee shop and the peeling paint on its walls and the fumes that never seem to go anywhere, it feels like a dick move to leave them in the lurch.

“I’ll negotiate for one week,” he compromises, and Sharon nods.

There’s a little dread, even, down in the pit of his stomach where it thinks it won’t be seen. And somehow, at the same time, there’s excitement there too, a shivering sort of anticipation of getting to go back to the work he’d so enjoyed, hopefully minus the Nazis this time. He’s going back to SHIELD.

~*~

Steve doesn’t know what he expects on his first day at this new SHIELD. Or rather, his overactive imagination had conjured several equally likely scenarios that he couldn’t quite decide between: SHIELD was operating out of back alleys and dimly lit rooms, SHIELD was scattered and separated and Steve would be working from home or a small office where nobody else worked, SHIELD was exactly as it had been, complete with offices and white walls and labs at their disposal.

The new SHIELD is none of these options, but it’s closest to the latter. Given that they’re still fighting the government for their property and headquarters, they’re not using their old offices, but they have bought a stately little office office building in the business end of Manhattan near Tony Stark’s eyesore of an Avengers Tower. Either by renovation or coincidence, the new headquarters are populated by sterile shoebox offices that are uncannily similar to the ones that’d been in the old SHIELD’s headquarters.

Coulson is the one the welcome Steve, and Sharon must have told him to stay calm, because his manner is admirably - unusually - cool and collected as he gives Steve the briefest of directions - “Offices that way; conference rooms that way; offices, more offices, mission rooms, mission rooms.” - before going on to explain their situation: Black Window had decrypted the HYDRA files and thrown them up online, that much was true, but she’d only gotten through a few levels of encryption. SHIELD was working through it, but that in itself took a long time with the sheer amount of data they had to wade through, and it was medium-clearance information at best. A lot of it was useless in the wake of HYDRA scattering: a lot of what SHIELD managed to put together were locations, routines, and supplies that had long been abandoned before SHIELD got to them.

And to make things worse, the higher-level information was far more zealously guarded, to the point that they’d had to get Tony Stark had his robots and programs on the job. To his credit, was managing to pry information out of the various sources at a much faster rate than SHIELD could manage alone, but from the thinly veiled frustration in Coulson’s voice as he relays this - well, being given all the remaining information now still wouldn’t be fast enough. Every day that they waste waiting for more information is another day that HYDRA can scatter through the world, another day that they might regroup.

The parts of the spiel that aren’t informative are all about extolling the virtues of the new SHIELD. The new and updated version of the organisation appears to have used the HYDRA debacle as a guidebook for what not to do: according to Coulson they’ve done away with a lot of the secrecy and compartmentalisation that made SHIELD so rigid, they’ve created a more accessible system by which to anonymously pass on information and opinions to higher-ups, they’ve created a system of accountability. All of which sounds good in theory, but Steve thinks that he can be forgiven for being a little sceptical.

“Anyway, we placed you with Sharon,” Coulson finishes, opening one of the many nondescript doors in this particular nondescript hallway. It reveals a small office stuffed with a large table at which Sharon is sitting. She waves. Opposite her, there is an empty desk and chair.

“Good to see you,” Sharon says, happy even through the stack of folders that has been piled onto her desk.

“I’ll let her do the rest of the talking,” Coulson says, and makes as though to depart before turning back at the last moment. “Steve,” he says, his tone unusually meaningful. “I hope you find him.”

“Uh,” Steve stutters out. His checked-out brain takes a long agonising moment to start working again and figure out what Coulson means. “Thanks. I mean, me too?” Coulson gives him another nod, and lets the door slide shut after him this time.

“Smooth,” Sharon says, her tone just on the edge of a snicker. Steve points at her.

“I completely checked out for most of that tour,” he says, in the fiercest voice he can muster.

“Fair enough,” Sharon says cheerfully. “ _I_ got shown around by Melinda May. It was incredibly efficient and over at least seventy-five percent sooner than your trip.”

“Yeah, yeah, rub it in,” Steve mutters as he takes his seat. It is, sadly, just as uncomfortable as his old chair. He suppresses a sigh. “Catch me up?”

“Just don’t be misled by Coulson’s constant whining about how much better we could be doing,” Sharon assures him. Her posture shifts from relaxed to businesslike in a second, a flipped switch. “Pretty much all the files that are still encrypted are specific-activity, stuff like mission reports. They’re most useful during legal proceedings, and those take forever anyway. These?” she gestures at the files on her desk. “They’re personnel profiles. They’re all fair game.”

“So what am I doing with them?” Steve asks, warily eyeing the even half of her pile that Sharon is moving to put on his desk.

“Well, evaluating them, first,” she says. “If they’ve done enough to be arrested for, you find them. Then field agents,” she gestures at herself, “go out and arrest them, and then legal proceedings start.”

“And you haven’t found _all these people_?” Steve asks, a little incredulous and a lot concerned, staring down at the stack of manila on his desk. His desk starts at his elbows and the pile easily comes up to his collarbone.“How many of you are on the job again?”

“Not enough,” Sharon says grimly, which Steve can’t help but notice isn’t really an answer. He can feel his heart sink. “So get moving,” she says, and despite her words the tone behind them is gentle, more of a verbal nudge than anything else. A _we can’t do anything about that so let’s do something about this_.

“Sure, sure,” Steve says, and brings up his old familiar friends, the facial recognition and face-changing predictive programs.

To his credit, he manages to get a few hours of work done, putting faces into the databases and fiddling with predictives and hypotheticals to create something of a virtual safety net around the face they’re looking for so that they don’t miss fugitives who’d tried to elude cameras by getting a nose job. Facial recognition is a lot less effective and a lot more primitive than agencies would have the general population believe; it’s not smart enough to create that safety net on its own, and it’s not smart enough to evaluate the faces it _does_ catch thanks to that safety net. Agencies still need human eyes for both ends of the facial recognition process, and with the workload that staring up at Steve - he really doesn’t think he can be blamed if his safety nets are a little narrower than usual.

Before SHIELD had been big enough to keep staff on a constantly rotating shift; Steve had never had to do data input for more than one full shift, and usually not even then. Now, though - he has to bite back another sigh as he looks at the files in front of him. It’s another testament to how short-staffed they are that they’re using field agents at the top of their game as data processors.

He gets about ten faces done before completely running out of steam and slamming his head down on his keyboard. Sharon doesn’t even flinch, just hums and clicks something obnoxiously loudly. Then she taps the table pointedly, and the noise of her fucking nails travels right through the cheap plastic and, it feels like, directly into Steve’s hearing aids.

He groans and pulls up a game of online chess. Barely a second later, an anonymous player requests to join the game; when Steve looks over at Sharon her face is utterly blank and she is focused on her screen. Steve suppresses his own grin and accepts her request.

Their routine of data processing interspersed with chess games becomes normal so quickly that within a few days of work Steve starts to feel like he’s always been working at SHIELD. The only variation comes when Steve enters his sketches into the database, feeling mildly foolish the entire time. He doesn’t even have a picture of his soulmate, and why is he expecting the already-fussy programs to look for him based off of sketches?

It’s worth a try, he keeps telling himself as he fiddles with features and tries not to smack his computer for being so thoroughly stupid about graphite markings. Once he’s finally satisfied with the translation of the facial features, and the safety net around them, it’s not entirely unsurprising that the program basically gives him nothing. Steve honestly can’t tell whether he’s disappointed about that - for all that he does want to find his soulmate, well, it’s also entirely possible that using SHIELD resources to track James down like he would a criminal wouldn’t be the best way to meet physically. All things considered, Steve is not as disappointed with his lack of results as he’d thought he was going to be.

On the fourth day of his new employment - and it’s only the fourth day, what the fuck, it hasn’t even been a week and Steve is already absurdly acclimatised to the job - something finally gives. He - and everyone else in the organisation, from the looks of it - is sent an email titled _New Target_ , which is ominous.

Attached to the email is a headshot, a graduation photo taken by the US Army, but this one’s different from what Steve’s previously worked with; for one thing it’s older, and the colours are slightly warped as though the photograph had suffered through a few years out in the world before being digitized. For another thing, though, there’s something about the face in it that niggles at Steve’s memory. Something about the jaw, maybe, or the eyes - something about this guy’s face is familiar, and he didn’t know what. Steve spent a solid five minute squinting at the photo and letting himself be annoyed about it before even reading the email underneath.

 _Agents Black Widow and Falcon have identified the agent of HYDRA referred to as The Winter Soldier or The Asset in documentation_ , it starts, and goes on to detail the frankly fantastic story of war hero, the first Captain America’s right-hand man, and Howling Commando - the only Howling Commando to die in the course of duty, Steve remembers, they went over this endlessly during high school history - James B. Barnes being captured, tortured, and brainwashed by HYDRA. Which would be unbelievable enough, but the files go on to detail his assassination of 54 people over the next seventy years while simultaneously not aging himself. The picture on file of him is from his days in the US Army because apparently once he was in HYDRA is was either too important or not important enough for them to have taken any pictures of him. SHIELD is looking to bring the man in for questioning, now.

He’d been fought and subdued by the Falcon, was the thing, during the massive fuck up that nobody really knew anything about except for what it’d resulted in: a whole lot of debris crashing into the Potomac and a whole lot of earth-shattering data crashing into the internet. The Falcon had added a little addendum in the footer that said he was fairly certain Barnes was the one to pull him out of the Potomac given, the note said, that the only other individual capable of it was Captain America and nobody was under any illusions about whether Rumlow would’ve been doing any saving, just then, given both his allegiance and his status of stuck under a building.

“Sharon, are you getting this?” Steve asks. He’s pretty sure that nobody could have hacked into SHIELD’s email server specifically to send him this message while also making it look like everyone else got the same message, but, well, it never hurts to check. Especially given a story like this one.

“Mm,” Sharon says. “54 assassinations, and those are only the ones credited to him. If he wasn’t HYDRA - if he wasn’t _brainwashed_ \- I’d be pretty impressed.” Despite her words, she does sound deeply impressed.

“You think he was really brainwashed?” Steve asks. Partly because he truly is sceptical of people who use the tried-and-true excuse of brainwashing, but also partly because he just doesn’t want it to be true. If HYDRA truly had figured out a way to turn people into puppets - that would be terrifying.

“I trust the Falcon,” Sharon says mildly, but no matter the mildness of her tone it still brings the most prominent reason they _do_ believe him - his leading role in taking HYDRA down - to the forefront of Steve’s mind, along with a lot of bad memories and unpleasant hypotheticals. “Plus, if anyone can,” she continues, “it’s HYDRA, right? They had the guy for seventy years.”

“Okay, yeah, fair,” Steve admits. Seventy years of torture - that’s way, way too much.

“But then his skills were probably worsened by the, the torture and brainwashing,” Sharon says. “We might have to start being a lot more scared of him.”

Steve looks back at the picture on his computer screen, the young solemn face staring out at him. There’s something familiar about him; it’s simultaneously impossible and easy to believe that the photograph was taken maybe seventy years ago. “Does he - does he look like someone we know?” Steve asks, looking back at his screen. “One of your field agent gang, maybe?”

Sharon tilts her head and squints heavily at her own screen, but shakes her head even after all that effort. “No,” she says, and then sits up straight, eyes sharp on Steve. “You recognise him? You think you’ve seen him?” she starts quizzing. “Maybe you did. Walked past him in a park or something. He comes from Brooklyn, after all. Steve?”

“I - no,” Steve says, eyes still glued to the picture in front of him. “I don’t think so.”

The uncertainty in his voice seems to relax and disappoint Sharon at once; she slumps backwards, but her posture loses its tension, too. “Maybe it’s the textbooks,” she offers. “God knows we studied the Commandos as much as we studied Columbus.”

“More, even,” Steve parries, but his gaze can’t seem to shift away from James B. Barnes. He can’t shake the feeling that he’s seen this guy before, vital and vivid and present, and not a flat image in a dry textbook - even if Steve spent longer than he wants to admit in high school looking at those pictures of the dashing James B. Barnes. That picture stares out at him, Barnes with a clenched jaw and serious eyes. He knows that face, he swears he does. He shakes his head, trying to get rid of or at least slow down the frantically turning wheels in his head. The only way to remember something like this is to let it simmer in the back of his mind until it comes to its own conclusion.

He turns his attention back to the files of information they’d been given in an attempt to distract himself and at least partly stay on topic, but his brain seems determined to sabotage him today. For every new piece of information it is presented with, Steve can only make comparisons to how little information he’d been receiving on targets in the old SHIELD. Sometimes he’d be told to make a judgement call on less than a page of information - less than half a page, even, and he’d gone along with it and called it doing his job. James Barnes’s profile is eighteen pages long, complete with footnotes from Black Widow and the Falcon.

Some of the calls - a lot of them, maybe - that Steve’s made would probably be different, if he had this much information on every target. His heart weighs heavy in his stomach at that thought.

“Get back to work, slacker,” Sharon says, and flicks a little ball of wadded-up paper at him, just in case her voice hadn’t been enough to pull him out of his thoughts.

~*~

It takes thirteen days that Steve pretends not to keep track of for him to step out again: he does it right in front of the door to his apartment, this time, on his way back from work with Sharon just behind him. He’s just slid the key on the lock when he feels the now almost-familiar sensation of being tugged out of his head, and this time to stepping out is almost effortless. Like it’s just right, for him to leave where he is to be with his soulmate.

James’s apartment is the same. His view is the same. Something in Steve’s chest loosens, at that.

“James?” he asks, twisting.

“Hi, Steve,” James says. He’s standing in the corner of the room, and his hand is clutched tight around a pair of scissors that look ready to snap under the pressure he’s putting on it. Steve - does not think about how strong his soulmate might be. Not at all.

“Uh - what are you doing?” he asks, trying his best to keep the concern out of his voice and unsure of whether he succeeds. James just shrugs.

“Thought I’d cut my hair,” he murmurs. Now that they’re in step, his emotions come through the bond far more strongly, and Steve can feel the slight nervousness, the little bit of shyness that accompanies the sentiment.

“Oh,” is all Steve can say. The two of them stand there staring at each other in a moment that stretches out endlessly, until James ducks his head.

“You, uh - you should go,” he says, and Steve has already yelped out a “No!” before he realises that James seems even more reluctant to enforce the idea than he was last time, and he hasn’t moved from his position.

“I can help you,” Steve says, transparently attempting to bargain. “To cut your hair, I mean.” James looks unconvinced, opens his mouth, and Steve hurries to add something, anything to convince him. James’s face changes before he can think of something, though, and Steve realises that his urgency must have been palpable through their bond. He can’t quite regret the unintended openness, when it makes James relax a little and look down.

“That’d be - good,” he says, instead of whatever his original reaction was going to be. There’s gentle Brooklyn coming out in his accent that Steve hadn’t noticed before. “Thank you.”

“No problem,” Seve says, and then - “But you will let me cut your hair, right? You won’t splinter me when I get close?”

James does hesitate for a second, for less than a second, and then he shakes his head, a rueful smile touching his lips. “I promise,” he says, in that low voice of his. “After the cut, though, all bets are off,” he says, and when Steve snorts, the smile that raises James’s mouth is a lovely thing.

It feels like a bigger step than it probably is, crossing the room in small strides so that Steve’s standing in front of James, looking up into his already-dear face again. And then James presses the scissors into Steve’s grip, and that - if walking to him had been big then this feels monumental. It’s not exactly a huge leap to assume that James doesn’t trust the people around him, given that he’s always alone and the apartment never shows any sign of a new presence, and he’s chosen to trust Steve with sharp things near his head. Steve takes a breath, at that.

“Come sit down,” Steve says, tugging at James’s arm. Once their destination - the fire escape - becomes apparent, though, James digs his heels in so quickly that Steve nearly loses his grip and falls over. His glasses dangle precariously over the edge of his nose. “What -?”

“Not out there,” James says. “Too open.”

Steve looks doubtfully at the small, cramped fire escape. James has an agent’s way of thinking, he realises upon seeing the surrounding buildings flanking the one they’re in, the many vantage points they’re open to. James has some sort of tactical knowledge, then; deep-rooted, if his avoidance of open spaces is as instinctual and insistent as it seems.

“Alright,” he acquiesces, and James’s surprise and gratefulness filter through both his end of the bond and his expression. “But it means you’ve gotta clean the hair from inside.”

“Sure,” James says, soft. Steve wags a finger at him,

“I’d better not see any hair next time I step in,” he warns, and that small smile tips at the corners of James’s mouth again.

“Think I can manage that,” he says. When he guides Steve to a place of his choosing, Steve can’t help but to notice it’s defensible above all else: equidistant from the front and back doors, and out of range from any shots that might come through the boarded-up windows. Again, he has to tamp down on the nervous curiosity that starts rearing its head. What has his soulmate been through, to be so very paranoid?

When Steve returns his attention to the presence in front of him, James’s shoulders are tight and discomfort is radiating through their bond. “Relax, please,” Steve says quietly. James nods tensely, and Steve rolls his eyes and reaches up to press down against the sharp, tight line of James’s shoulders. “It’s a haircut, is all. All you have to do is clean up after.”

James cracks a small grin at the dig, but his shoulders don’t really budge under Steve’s hands. He indicates for Steve to hop up onto the table pressed against the wall, and grabs a spindly chair to straddle so that he’ll be at a comfortable level for Steve’s arms. It creaks unhappily under him but holds, and James twists his head around to look at Steve as though he’s not worried the thing’s about to collapse.

“That okay?” he asks.

Steve nods. “Fine,” he says. “How short d’you want it?”

“You know how to handle haircuts?” James asks, and he has the audacity to sound sceptical. Steve snorts, nudges at the closest chair leg with his foot.

“Hey, don’t question the barber.”

“That’s a no, isn’t it?”

“That’s not a no, you jerk,” Steve says immediately. “ _For_ your information, I cut my mam’s hair and she cut mine, and then when I moved out I cut my own.” For what is possibly the first time, he’s grateful for that particular aspect of his not particularly well-off childhood; usually it’s something he makes a face at himself for in the mirror, briefly wonders whether he should go somewhere professional, and then puts off taking the leap and trying something new.

James’s head lolls back as Steve is thinking, presumably to evaluate the state of Steve’s hair. The long line of his neck is visible in this position, and it makes Steve stare and blush. Then it makes him look away quickly and pray James doesn’t notice anything.

“It’ll do, I guess,” James says, but now there’s apprehension coming through the bond, a nervousness that Steve doesn’t like.

“What?” he asks.

“The haircut -”

“No, I mean, I can feel you being nervous,” he says. “If you really - I mean, if you want we can try for something else, or look for barbers in the city -”

“I - no, it’s fine, it wasn’t that,” James says. “You’re fine, I promise. S’just me.”

“Hm,” Steve mutters. He doesn’t exactly buy it, but then there’s not much else he can do. “It better do, then,” he says, and tries to nudge the chair again. Tries being the operative word, because he had only just begun to move when James reached back and grabbed Steve’s foot, grip warm and firm on Steve’s ankle even through the gloves he’s wearing. “Hey,” Steve tries to grumble, but it’s weak.

James ducks his head and Steve can see his cheek muscles bunch up, very slightly. Steve hadn’t ever considered the angles of James’s smiles, but now he wants to know all of them.

“Ready?” he asks instead of letting this come out. He places a hand on James’s shoulder to preemptively discourage further tensing of the muscles. It only kind of works, but Steve will take it.

“Yes,” James says, firm. “Do it.”

Steve snips the scissors once to get a feel for them, and it looks like James’s whole body goes taut at the noise. But - but then Steve cards his fingers through James’s hair, and it’s meant just to gather up some strands and measure what needs cutting, but after a tense moment James relaxes into the touch. He melts; that’s the only word that can describe it, he relaxes into the chair and leans his head back into Steve’s hand like a cat asking for more.

Very gently, Steve slides his other hand through James’s hair, scissors forgotten on his lap. This new touch doesn’t quite double the relaxation, but it comes close. When a hand ventures towards the nape of James’s neck a little shiver works its way down his back, but he doesn’t protest. His side of the bond goes a little loose and happy, and Steve has to restrain himself from wrapping himself around his soulmate.

“Hey,” James says, voice even raspier than usual, once the little clock on the wall says that Steve has spent about five minutes doing nothing but petting his soulmate. “Thought you were gonna give me a haircut.” His accent’s mellowed out even more, and the broad vowels of Brooklyn are clear in his voice.

“Mhm,” Steve says. “Standard procedure. Gotta check for knots and tangles.” James huffs out a breath of laughter, and Steve grins down at the top of his head. When he finally does pick the scissors back up and starts cutting in earnest James only flinches a little, and Steve is sure that his thrill of happiness reverberates down their bond.

Steve’s pretty sure that a professional barber could do everything in ten minutes from the same position, but he’s not a professional barber, so once he’s done with the back of James’s head he hops off the table to come around to his side and continue working.

“I could turn my head for you, you know,” James drawls from under half-closed eyes.

“Shut it, jerk, you looked too peaceful to move.” And, well, Steve had wanted to see James’s face. Who could blame him? His soulmate had a lovely face, and currently it was as relaxed as Steve had seen it, eyes half closed and expression loose.

He has a vaguely familiar lovely face. Steve wasn’t entirely sure when the unsettled idea starts to grow in his mind, only that as he cuts he keeps glancing back at James’s face and at some point he grows from idly looking to actively seeking - reassurance, confirmation, both, neither, he doesn’t know. James’s face looked different now, older and more tired, lines in his forehead and tightness in his mouth, but - Steve had known the photograph SHIELD distributed looked familiar. It shouldn’t have taken him this long to recognise James, no matter that his face was thinner or stubble was covering his cheeks and chin, but - well, Steve can only think that he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it until it became impossible to ignore. Who wanted to tie their soulmate’s face to that of an international assassin?

He tries to keep his mouth shut and his eyes blank, but he can’t hide the apprehension and concern in his own mind, and James isn’t fooled in the slightest.

“What’s wrong,” he says, not a question, when Steve puts down his scissors and brushes off his hands. Steve keeps his head down, avoids James’s gaze and feels like the worst person in existence at the worry that resonates through their bond. Then again, there’s a part of him that also feels like the most put-upon person in existence; of all the people in the world to first believe they didn’t have a soulmate and then finally end up with one only to find out he’s a professional assassin for a neo-Nazi group? A maybe- _brainwashed_ neo-Nazi assassin. That might make all the difference, a stupid hopeful part of him pipes up.

Steve has the worst luck.

“Steve,” James says again, but this time there is something like defeat in his voice. Steve studies the floor. “Tell me?”

“I think you know,” Steve forces out through numb lips. Even to his own ears his voice is flat and stiff. “You’re -”

He breaks off because he doesn’t want to say it. Because he doesn’t want it to be true. Because his body, left behind in New York, will say whatever he says here and now, and he doesn’t want anyone to hear the name in his mind. When he looks up James is watching him carefully, and his eyes are carefully emotionless. They look grey, like all the colour’s been sucked out of them.

And, well, James had been an American soldier before everything else. He’d been the second-in-command of possibly the most famous rebel groups across Europe to fight Nazis. The Falcon had fought him, had said he seemed coerced. Seemed hesitant, once the Falcon had started talking to him.

“The Winter Soldier,” James says, his eyes on Steve’s face. It doesn’t manage to stop Steve from flinching at the words, at the reality of it. Slowly, James peels off his right glove, and the evidence in front of Steve is undeniable: the harsh glint of metal.

“Did you do it for - for them?” Steve blurts out, the words spilling out of him before he can yank them back, making him choke on what he doesn’t want anyone to hear just in case. “Did - the files said you were tortured. Brainwashed. Were you?”

James shrugs. It’s not the most reassuring answer. “They had a chair,” he says simply. “But it - it was still my hands on the gun. My eyes behind the rifle.” Carefully, his side of the bond starts to go muffled, like he’s blocking it off, blocking himself off. Steve hates that feeling, no matter that it’s only a pale imitation of the absence he’d felt before ever meeting James; it’s close enough, and he hates it.

“So you wanted to do it,” Steve challenges. “You signed up, willingly -”

“No!” James snaps, and it’s - the mixture of responses, they make the perfect answer. A remorseless man would have insisted that he was innocent. A half-decent man would be guilty for what he’d been made to do, and Steve, wishful thinking or not, thinks that James is more than half decent.

“You shouldn’t,” James continues helplessly, brokenly. Steve wants to wrap him up and keep him in a blanket forever. “I’m -”

“You’re not their weapon,” Steve says. “Not anymore.” James looks up at him, incredulity evident in his eyes and weakly through his bond. Steve knocks at the wall James has formed - just lightly, as gently as he can mentally manage, but undeniably there, as well, and his meandering thoughts lead him to - “Oh. Oh. That - the bond, that was them too, wasn’t it? They found a way to suppress it. That’s - that’s why -”

James frowns. “I didn’t - I couldn’t feel a bond when I was the Soldier,” he says slowly. “I don’t remember a bond at all.”

“I never felt a bond at all,” Steve says. “Everyone thought I was bondless. Well, my mam and my doctor, because we decided to keep it under wraps. A few of my friends know, too. I mean -” His thoughts are all muddled and circling each other, and the distress he can feel emanating even past James’s self-imposed wall isn’t helping. “And the - oh, have the headaches been you too? All month, I’ve been getting these splitting migraines and aches everywhere -”

“I think that was me,” James realises. “I was - coming off their programming. I - my head - I’m sorry,” he says, like any of this is his fault. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know - I didn’t know you’d feel that. I didn’t know you’d grow up like that. I wasn’t -”

“Not through any fault of your own!” Steve says indignantly. James ducks his head miserably.

“I should’ve felt you. Or -”

“Or something,” Steve finishes, and snorts. “James, you did. And now you’re here, and I’m here, and we - that’s - that’s enough. I’m,” he starts, hesitates, starts again. Fuck, but he’s a mess. But James seems to be at least slightly amused at it, so it’s not all bad, can’t be. “I’m so glad to have a soulmate. I thought I didn’t, for the longest time. Did you -?” he asks. “When you were young, I mean. Did you feel a bond?”

James cracks a little grin, for once. “Yeah, and it was the weak bond, you know, when your soulmate hasn’t been born yet,” he says. “We waited and waited - I got to being pretty concerned after I hit fifteen. And then twenty, and twenty-five -” He shakes his head. “I just decided I must’ve been wrong about the not yet born. Thought you must’ve been dead. And look at me now. I gotta be pushing ninety, a hundred. Fuckin’ cradle snatcher.”

Steve snorts. “Yeah, you’re positively decrepit,” he says, and tries tapping again on James’s wall. It’s come down a little, unguarded, as they’ve spoken, but it’s still fairly well sealed off and Steve - for all that he should probably be used to the sensation he still very much dislikes it.

James looks up at him, an utterly nonthreatening movement, but Steve still finds himself backing down immediately. “Hey, you don’t have to let me in if you don’t want to.” _Please want to_ , he finds himself thinking, and hopes James doesn’t catch it. He manages a weak smile. “Just thought I’d knock. Tell me to piss off, if you want.”

“I don’t want you to piss off,” James says, soft. “I just - my mind’s not a great place, sometimes.”

“Neither’s mine,” Steve says. “It’s not like I’m getting complete access to all your memories, anyway. Just - feelings.”

“I know how a soulbond works, punk,” James grumbles.

The wall around his mind lowers, unmistakeable, and Steve flinches now, awkward and cursing himself. “You don’t have to, James -”

“I don’t mind if you don’t,” James says, as the last of the wall comes down and their bond carefully comes back - online, is the best way Steve can find to think of it. Comes unstuck, maybe. “And - my friends. Back - my friends called me Bucky,” James - _Bucky_ \- offers. There’s something shy about his words, and at both the offer and the bond resonating between them Steve is the one to melt, now. He loves the feeling, loves the connection. Loves the gentle way that Bucky is letting Steve see small pieces of himself, when he has every right to guard himself meticulously.

“Can I - touch you?” Steve asks, tentative, and Bucky responds in the best possible fashion: by opening his arms. In his soulmate’s arms is, without a doubt, the best place Steve has found himself in. The only thing that has a chance to top this is doing it out of step, both of them in the same place at the same time.

Bucky’s mind is softly, quietly happy. Steve thinks he’s just about incandescent as he concentrates on their bond, wraps them up in it, a blanket for their minds. Bucky takes a breath, stoops his neck to be closer to Steve.

He thinks he’d be angry about missing out on so much time he could have spent revelling in their bond, but he can’t bring himself to anger, held in Bucky’s arms as he is. As long as he gets to have it, now, and keep having it - that’s enough.

~*~

Steve tries to stop drawing Bucky so much, after that. When one’s soulmate is an internationally wanted assassin - wanted for questioning only, thank fuck, it’d taken Steve a while to remember that and be grateful for it, that his soulmate didn’t have a price on his head - one tries not to go around advertising their unique connection to him on scrap bits of paper and napkins that anyone can find. The operative word there being tries, because Steve’s fingers are itchy to draw, and to draw his soulmate specifically. Steve compromises by keeping his drawings to tiny snippets of Bucky: a hand, a pair of thighs, the curve of a jaw, the skyline again. Nothing incriminating, unless someone is going through Steve’s garbage and putting it all together. Which is a thought that has Steve either hoarding his drawings or burning them, like the paranoid agent that he is.

“Hey,” Sharon says when he’s putting in the finishing touches to the city view Bucky has out of his window, “I do know that building, that’s the Floreasca City Centre. It’s -”

“No!” Steve yelps, but by then it’s already too late.

“- in Bucharest,” Sharon finishes, and frowns at him. “Are you okay? Steve? Hey, no, don’t throw that away, what are you doing -”

There is no way Steve is getting out of this. Sharon’s going to worm it out of him and they both know it, but that doesn’t stop him from valiantly attempting to actually get the paper in the bin (the burn bin, as Steve has started calling it, since he takes it out to the fire escape once a week and burns everything in it) and pretend that nothing is out of the ordinary. “What did you want, Sharon?” he asks brightly, directly to her incredibly unimpressed face.

“Well, Steve,” Sharon says, very patient in a way that suggests she does not feel any patience whatsoever. “You wanted me to identify a skyline for you, and I did, and now you seem pretty upset about it.”

“I’m not upset,” Steve says, lying through his teeth. He’d wanted that plausible deniability, goddamnit.

“You’re upset,” Sharon says, without missing a beat. The perils of living with someone for years.

“Can you - not ask me why?” Steve asks, and something in his voice or his face must get his urgency across because it makes Sharon do a double take, makes her gaze grow heavier, more considering.

“Is it dangerous?” she asks, slow.

Steve shakes his head.

“That goes for you, too,” Sharon says, and Steve hesitates. He still shakes his head, after a few seconds; Bucky won’t hurt him, he knows that down to his bones. But, well, when international agencies vie for the custody of someone, people tend to get caught in the crossfires. That will hurt. If Bucky is hurt, somehow - that will hurt worse.

“I don’t trust you, goddamnit,” Sharon mutters, but she presses her lips together and turns away, doesn’t ask anything else.

“I’ll tell you soon,” Steve promises her retreating back, because he does intend to tell her when things with the Winter Soldier case have cooled off a bit. Sharon nods again, managing to make the gesture of assent look supremely dissenting, and then leaves, although not before casting another concerned look at Steve and Steve’s burn bin.

Just to be safe, Steve doesn’t bother waiting for the end of the week to burn the contents of his wastebasket. He doesn’t even wait until the end of the day.


	3. Chapter 3

“Give me good news, Steven,” Erskine says from his desk when Steve walks in. The results from Steve’s scans had been forwarded to him as a matter of course, and the bloodwork had been fine, so he hasn’t the slightest idea as to why Steve’s booked another appointment, which is probably the reason for his furrowed brows, his wrinkled forehead.

“I’ve got good news,” Steve says through a throat that threatens to close up on him. There’s a reason he hadn’t provided Toni the receptionist with any details to pass on, just a request to slot him in when Erskine was free. “I - um.”

“Spit it out,” Erskine says, and his accent is slightly thicker than normal.

“I have a soulmate,” Steve blurts out. Silence falls in the office, and in it Steve is overwhelmed by sensation: the over-excited beating of his heart, the little stripes of heat that his fingernails make against his palms, the thrum of blood in his ears. He has a soulmate, he _knows_ he does, and yet he’s terribly afraid that he doesn’t. That a doctor’s office is going to be where he’s quietly told that his mind’s fucked up again; that Bucky wasn’t meant to be Steve’s soulmate, that Bucky had someone else or was as bondless as Steve and somehow, through some mistake, they’d been pushed together that way, mismatched and ill-fitting. Bucky had, after all, spent long agonising days pushing against the bond. Pushing at _Steve_ , until he’d splintered through walls.

Steve nearly hadn’t come to the appointment. When it had been his literal heart on the line he hadn’t been half as frightened as he is now.

Erskine’s eyes are wide. Steve’s fists clench a little harder, of their own volition, his desperate fear badly disguised as anger.

“I’m not crazy,” he says, trying his best to keep his voice from snapping and not quite sure that he succeeds. “I’m _not_. He’s there, I can feel him, he -”

“You’re sure,” Erskine says, not a question. Steve’s teeth click together as he shuts his mouth and nods. “You’re - oh, my,” Erskine breathes. “I think I need to sit down.”

“You are sitting down,” Steve says.

“The possibilities -” Erskine breathes, and then he springs into action at his computer. “I’m booking you in for another brain scan,” he says, typing like a demon, the fastest Steve thinks he has ever seen the usually calm and collected man move. “Tell me about it,” he says. “What happened, what did you feel - what _do_ you feel -”

“It just - felt like my brain expanded,” Steve says helplessly, hating how clumsy the words feel in his mouth, in his brain. “Like there’s a bridge to - to somewhere that’s not me. He’s warm even when we’re not in step.”

Erskine watches Steve calmly, questions him calmly, and doesn’t bat an eyelash at any of the responses, no matter how badly worded, no matter how much Steve himself might stumble and wince. There is no sign of disbelief on his face. It makes Steve feel weak at the knees for all that he’s also sitting down, makes his fear and anger drain away slowly until there’s nothing left but hesitant, careful joy.

“You believe me?” he asks, heart tight.

“I will admit that I’ve never dealt with anyone like you,” Erskine says slowly, “but I have dealt with a few late bloomers. Statistically it’s always been far more likely that your soulmate will turn up than that you go through your entire life without a bond.”

Erskine’s said that to Steve a few times before, he remembers. Sometime during his angry teenage years he’d snapped at Erskine to stop telling him that, because it was clear that he didn’t have a soulmate and never would, not with the way soulmates always, always developed.

“You were right,” he says now, and now he smiles, his body loosening and his hands falling limp to his sides as he relaxes. Erskine believes him. Sharon believes him. Steve’s not going mad, he’s not imagining things. He hadn’t thought he was, exactly, except - well, if he was, this is where he’d be told so. And Erskine believes him.

A grin bubbles up from Steve’s chest, irrepressible. Bucky is Steve’s soulmate. Steve truly does have a soulmate, after so many years of - well, not.

“But,” Erskine says with a frown, and Steve’s heart drops, “your chest pains still worry me.”

“They do? But - soulmate,” Steve says. “I mean - forming the bond? Don’t most people experience growing pains?” Steve had not paid much attention at the soulmate talks at school; to be fair, he was pretty sure nobody really did, even if Steve took it a little further in his petty teenage anger and skipped those talks. He’d had no interest in hearing about everything he was missing out on.

“Growing pains manifest as headaches, mostly,” Erskine says.

“I was getting mostly headaches,” Steve says immediately, which is - true, if somewhat glossing over the rest of his aches and pains.

“Don’t you dare sweep this under the rug,” Erskine retorts. “Sharp, enduring pain has a - only a tiny chance of being a result of your soulmate. You know the standard metric, surely -”

“Broken arm equals aching,” Steve says, because even he couldn’t bury his head deep enough to miss that particular fact. It was drilled into everyone from primary school: if you’re aching and you don’t know why, you tell someone immediately.

“That’s true, if slightly generalised,” Erskine says. “And the aching that comes through is dull, a thoroughly secondhand sensation. That’s not what you were describing to me. To achieve that your soulmate would have to be going through - quite remarkable pain for a fairly sustained period.” He peers at Steve over his glasses. “You said you’ve fallen in step - has he ever been bleeding? Laid up? Limping or otherwise injured?” Steve shakes his head at each item, slow, and tries not to blanch.

His thoughts go immediately to Bucky and HYDRA and how they might have fought for their asset, how they might have done something to make him hurt when he was away from them for too long or too far. He thinks about the way Bucky had dimmed a little, when he’d said _coming off their programming_. And as a human with enhanced abilities - well, it’s certainly not impossible that he might withstand the sort of pain that would leave everyone else in the hospital, the sort of pain that would come through as achingly sharp to his soulmate. The ways that he could have been hurt seem endlessly frighteningly believable. When Steve shivers and tries to refocus on the clinic around him Erskine is still peering at him.

“Talk to me, Steve,” he says warningly, and Steve shrugs helplessly.

“I just - it’s classified, but - he’s an enhanced human,” Steve says. “I think he could - I think it could be him.” He almost hopes that his heart’s developed some new and hard-to-detect complication, if it’d spare Bucky, but he suspects that’s not how it’s allowed to go.

“An enhanced human,” Erskine hums, going back to his computer. He brings up Steve’s results again, looks through them as Steve sits and fidgets. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” he says, a little helplessly, once he’s done. “There’s - I can’t find anything.”

“So -” Steve starts, only to be cut off.

“So I’m going to keep you on a very strict regime of wait and see,” Erskine says as sharply as he can. Steve barely keeps from rolling his eyes.

“Wait and see,” he parrots anyway, when it becomes clear that Erskine is looking for an answer. There’s an unhappy harrumph from the other side of the table, but he lets Steve go, at least.

~*~

To her credit, Sharon does a fairly good job of keeping her worried glances and fretting over Steve to a minimum: he’s said that he’ll tell her and now all she has to do is not spontaneously combust while she waits. She’s trying her best, Steve knows, but the fact that he’s keeping something from her combined with his recent appointment with Erskine has her worried. He can’t hold fast for long under the weight of her genuine concern for him.

The day that SHIELD finds another new enemy to send through the rounds - one Yelena Belova, #203 to be enrolled in the Black Widow program and #24 to graduate, contracted multiple times by HYDRA for various highly-classified missions - Steve relaxes minutely.

“Sharon,” he says, once she’s finished reading her email. She looks up, raises her eyebrows in her _I’m listening_ way. “My soulmate,” he says. He twists his hands together, then hides them and their agitated movements behind his computer when Sharon’s gaze drops to them and her forehead starts to furrow.

“This is what you have to tell me?”

“Yes,” Steve says, stiff, and can’t bring himself to open his mouth again.

“Well, what -”

“He’s James Barnes,” Steve blurts out, and that stops Sharon in her tracks, and not just her words; her entire body seems to hitch and freeze in wide-eyed surprise. “He’s James Buchanan Barnes,” Steve repeats, and even though he tries his best to be quiet the words land like thunder in the air between them.

“James Buchanan Barnes,” Sharon repeats, her voice as flat as Steve has ever heart it. “The Winter Soldier. The _Winter Soldier_ -” she breaks off to laugh, the sound decidedly grim. “Of course your soulmate is the most prolific assassin - fuck, that the world has probably ever seen.”

“He was brainwashed,” Steve murmurs. “You were the one who pointed it out to me.” Sharon groans and rubs her face.

“Listen,” she says, and sighs, an exhalation that lasts forever. “Listen. It’s easy to say that when they’re not your best friend’s soulmate. Your soulmate who, might I add, threw you through walls to avoid being with you -”

“That’s not true!” Steve argues instantly. “It wasn’t about him, he thought I’d be better off with someone else -”

“Maybe you would -”

“He’s my _soulmate_ ,” Steve snaps, horrified and defensive at the mere suggestion of - of not being with Bucky, of breaking their bond. The bond is arguably the most precious thing anyone has; to sever it is the worst act imaginable, irredeemable and condemned even as it’s not physically possible. Sharon looks down immediately, deflates at the reminder. “He’s my soulmate,” Steve repeats, uselessly.

“I know,” Sharon murmurs. “I know, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have - it’s just that you’ve been bondless for so long. I just - I just want you to be sure, you know, that you’re not - jumping into it.”

“I’m not -” Steve starts before Sharon cuts him off again.

“Most people get years of slow building up -”

“I’m not eleven, I can handle seeing someone every couple of weeks without having a meltdown,” Steve says. His arms have folded themselves tightly and he drags them back to his sides to slowly to slide past Sharon’s notice. She softens more as she looks at him.

“It was them, wasn’t it? HYDRA. They blocked your connection somehow. That’s why -”

“That’s why we all thought I was bondless for so long,” Steve says. “It’s - it’s not him. It wasn’t.” He knows, now, unequivocal and irrevocable, that the man who’d leant into his touch so gingerly, who’d so shyly allowed himself to be happy, he couldn’t have assassinated fifty four people in cold blood. He couldn’t have while he was in his right mind.

“Seventy years,” Sharon mutters, and rubs her face again. Her mascara’s a little smudged when she looks back up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean - I guess I’m just scared for you. He’s a dangerous person to have as your soulmate.”

“Bucky wouldn’t hurt me,” Steve objects, and Sharon inclines her head.

“Maybe not on purpose,” she admits. “And not directly.” But they both know that HYDRA remains an unpredictable force, now numerous little offshoots of organisations instead of one larger, more cohesive one, and there’s not telling what they might do, how much they might expend, to get HYDRA’s soldier under their control once again. To have a soldier of their own.

“I’m not exactly helpless, you know,” Steve says, and that makes Sharon grin, pale but present. “Anyway,” he says lamely, when the silence grows awkward between them. “That was my news.”

“Yeah,” Sharon says, and shakes herself with visible effort. “Yeah. Honestly, it could’ve been worse. Erskine -?”

“He - well, I couldn’t tell him everything, obviously,” Steve says. “But he thinks - I told him that Bucky was enhanced, and, and he agreed that what I was feeling - it might not have been me.”

“Growing pains?”

“And - whatever was happening to Bucky,” Steve says, avoiding Sharon’s eyes. “He said he’d been coming off HYDRA’s programming.” He doesn’t need to say what that would mean for him, why it’d cause those sharp pains for Steve; they’d both read the file, read about the thousand cruelties Bucky had been subjected to. Steve snorts. “Is it awful that I hope the problem’s on my side? Erskine was talking about the kind of pain it’d take from him to make me feel it like I did, and -”

“It’s not good,” Sharon says gently, when Steve doesn’t finish. He nods and she comes around their desk, reaches out to wrap an arm around his shoulders. “I don’t want it to be either of you,” she says unhappily.

“Thanks,” Steve mutters. He’s due to fall in step with James again soon, hopefully. He can ask about it then.

~*~

Steve’s basic estimates tell him it’s probably going to be around ten or eleven days before he steps out again. It’s a surprise when he feels his mind tugged away from his body on the eighth day, but a pleasant one.

This stepping out is different, though, and Steve can feel that as soon as it happens. Sometime during the week James must have blocked off their bond again. It’s weak enough when they’re not in step that it’s not surprising that Steve hadn’t noticed it, but - well, now that he’s falling in step with Bucky is jarringly, awfully obvious that something is off on the other side of his bond.

“Bucky?” Steve asks, before he even opens his eyes. His surroundings are the same as always, almost down to the plates in the drying rack; what’s more interesting to him is his soulmate, and their suddenly blocked-off soulbond. “Bucky?”

Bucky is behind him, crouched and huddled against the wall in a mimicry of the position Steve had first seen him in. His eyes are downcast, and even the stripes of sunlight that are streaming through the window only hover around his feet, as though they’re too scared to touch him. Steve’s mind flashes back to Sharon telling him how a falling in step might be achieved outside the usual schedule: _times of great happiness or sadness,_ she’d said, and somehow Steve doesn’t think that this is the first one.

“Bucky, what’s wrong?” Steve breathes, and that’s what makes Bucky look up. Something soft drifts through his eyes before he lowers his gaze again, but as quick as he is Steve’s gaze is quicker: he sees the conflict, the unhappiness, and most concerningly, the self-loathing in Bucky, and it scares him. He lowers himself to the floor gently, as he would if he was trying to coax a scared animal out of a hiding place. “Please tell me,” he murmurs.

Bucky rouses himself enough to push a neatly organised manila folder towards Steve. “Read that,” he murmurs. His voice is rough again, from disuse or screaming. Steve hasn’t felt any pains over the course of the week; he thinks it’s somewhat safe to rule out screaming. Somewhat.

The papers are from a doctor, and one based in Romania if the logo and motto underneath it are anything to go by. The papers, however, are in English, and dreadfully, clearly understandable.

 _This being a report on the estimation of the mirroring effect which would be felt by the soulmate of one James B. Barnes_ , it starts.

There are over thirty pages in the folder. When Steve looks up, Bucky gestures for him to read them all.

Steve does.

For all that he’s been going to the doctor for his entire life, at first most of the paper, the introduction and the methodology, flies right over Steve’s head. The parts he understands come in at the results section - they’re various tortures, divided up into neat appendices and hypotheticals of how they might affect a potential soulmate.

There are thirty pages in the report; twenty of them are the results section. Steve has to take a break on the fifteenth page and retch into Bucky’s kitchen sink. When he sits back down, Bucky seems to have shrunk in on himself; Steve avoids his eyes and doggedly keeps forcing the words into his brain. His soulmate _lived_ this, he has to remind himself. The least he can do is read it. The _least_ -

His eyes burn, and he forces it back angrily.

On the last few pages, there is a neat and very well-organised table of everything in the results: short and succinct, the method of taking down a man. And then, on the other column…

The right-hand column listed the possible effects of each new torture, and the list is - hauntingly, achingly familiar: _heart arrhythmia, possible ventricular weakness, severely compromised immune system_ , it starts. And keeps going. The list of symptoms match uncannily well with Steve’s health problems, the ones that have been plaguing him his entire life. _This being an estimation of the mirroring effect felt by the soulmate of one James B. Barnes_ , rings through Steve’s mind.

“Oh,” he breathes. Bucky winces, but Steve couldn’t have helped it. It felt like the noise had been punched out of him.

He’d always thought - he’d never even begun to so much as _suspect_ \- he’d always just been extraordinarily unhealthy and bondless. He’d had a bad run of it, a series of increasingly infinitesimal chances of getting sick that his body had decided to take up, every time.

That a soulmate might be the cause - it makes him nauseous, to think of what Bucky had had to go through, and inexorably his eyes go back to the first column, methods of torture laid out so very neatly. They’re even categorised, Steve realises, sort of numbly. They’re categorised from head to toe. Shadows play over Bucky’s face when Steve looks at him.

“Bucky,” Steve says helplessly, and then he shuts his mouth, because he doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know what he can say except _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I hate that this happened to you._ “I’m sorry,” he chokes out, and something in Bucky’s eyes softens, saddens.

“It’s alright,” Bucky says, but it’s not, clearly, because his voice trembles. “I understand.”

Steve only realises that Bucky categorically and comprehensively does not understand what Steve is trying to say when he leans forward to sneak a fast kiss onto Steve’s forehead, once, gently, and says, “I wouldn’t want me, either. You - you can look for ways to break the bond, if you want. I can look, too,” in a voice that - that doesn’t shake anymore, that’s carefully modulated, and that’s worse than sadness.

“What - wait -” Steve starts, an awful sort of comprehension dawning on him, but then Bucky’s hands are on him again and he’s being pushed through a wall _again_ and he can’t leave when Bucky thinks Steve doesn’t want to be his soulmate, he can’t, and this splinter is the worst of all because all he wants to do is stay and explain that Bucky is an absolute idiot. His head aches and throbs for long, uncountable seconds, and then Steve comes back to himself, terribly alone, crumpled on the floor of his room.

~*~

The regret was blinding, immediate: Steve wanted to bite his own _tongue_ off, goddamn traitor that it was. Bucky thought that Steve didn’t want Bucky as his soulmate. Bucky thought that the things that had been done to him were, somehow, his fault. Or, well - Steve doesn’t think he’s that far into the abyss of self-blame. But he thinks it’s something to apologise for - and maybe it is, but Bucky shouldn’t be the one apologising, that falls to HYDRA -

Steve groans and thumps his forehead against the floor, ignoring the gritty feel of dust and dirt against his skin. His lungs start to tighten in protest, but Steve categorically refuses to vacuum now. He’s going through a crisis. His _soulmate_ is going through a crisis, and has pledged to find a way to not be Steve’s soulmate anymore. That definitely qualifies as a crisis. And that is the thought that propels Steve to his feet, that has him launching himself around the room like a possessed chaotic whirlwind, grabbing things and throwing them onto his bed and generally making a nuisance of himself.

“What - Steve, what are you _doing_?” Sharon’s voice says from the door. Her eyebrows are improbably high on her forehead as she watches Steve whirl around and nearly trip over himself at the sight of her. “What’s all the noise about? Steve,” she snaps when he turns away and tries to find his phone charger, “answer me.”

“I’m packing,” Steve says snippily. He’d fold his arms if he wasn’t using them, and he’s pretty sure that comes across in his tone.

Sharon sighs and folds her own arms, since she’s currently not doing anything except stand still and look annoyed. “What, for where, and why,” she demands.

“It’s Bucky,” Steve says, instead of answering any of those questions. “He’s - we misunderstood each other. He thinks I don’t want to be his soulmate, he’s, he’s looking for ways to break the bond and if anyone can do it it’s probably him so I have to _get to Romania_ -”

“Woah -” Sharon tries.

“- and find him and convince him he’s so wrong, he’s such an idiot, I can’t lose him -”

“Steve!” Sharon snaps, and Steve falls silent. It is mostly, he maintains, because he was running out of breath in any case. “So what’s your plan?” Sharon demands. “Just head off to Bucharest? Look around and hope that’s he’s around somewhere? Bucharest is a big city, Steve, with a lot of people in it. I’m calling it now, there’s no way you’re going to find him like this -”

“Like what -” Steve tries to snarl, but Sharon keeps going, relentless even as Steve starts to feel like all the air has been punched out of him for the second time in what feels like as many minutes, although it’s probably been longer than that.

“Like _this_ , going of half-cocked and unprepared!” Sharon snaps, and then something of his emotions must show on his face because her demeanour softens and she takes a step towards him. “You don’t have a chance, Steve,” she repeats, her tone soft, almost apologetic.

Steve rubs his face, not quite ready to admit that she’s right, that he knows she’s right.

“Hey,” Sharon says, still soft as she approaches him with gentle steps. Like Steve himself had approached Bucky, so recently and so long ago. Her footsteps are quiet and deliberate, and when she gets close enough she puts a steadying hand on Steve’s shoulder. “You wanna tell me what happened?”

“No,” Steve says miserably, and shrugs to say _but I will anyway_. “He -” Steve says. “You know how he was with HYDRA?”

“With HYDRA, like - _with_ them, or -?” Sharon starts, uncertain, and Steve is so tired that he can’t even muster up his usual energy to jump to Bucky’s defence. He can only shake his head, minute.

“No,” he finally says, voice so low as to be barely audible. “No. Not like that. You know they - had him. For seventy years.”

“I know that,” Sharon confirms.

“They tortured him,” Steve says, and something about saying the words makes them - makes them feel real, makes his eyes start to burn. He kind of wants to throw up again. _They tortured him._ His soulmate had been tortured. “They did - so much shit to him, Sharon. He showed me the files.”

“Why?”

“He went to a doctor with them,” Steve says, and his voice wobbles. “He asked - what a soulmate might feel, if someone was - was subjected to -” He grits his teeth against the unsteadiness in his throat.

Sharon, bless her, is clever. He doesn’t need to explain anything more; and for all that she’s usually fairly composed too, her eyes widen now, her hand claps over her mouth, both movements unrestrained and shocked. “You -?” she starts through her fingers, and can’t finish.

“It matched - pretty much all my symptoms,” Steve says, flat and staring downwards. His floor is linoleum and patterned. There’s a stain just next to his right foot, dark and unidentifiable.

“Oh, Steve -” Sharon starts, in a voice that verges on unbearably sympathetic right now.

“And then,” he interrupts, his voice slightly unsteady, maybe, but coherent, “I said _sorry_ , because, you know, I am, that’s - that’s awful shit to have to’ve gone through, but, but he said he understood, and he wouldn’t want him for a soulmate either, and then he said I should look for a way to break the bond and that he’d help and then he _pushed me through the fucking wall again_ -”

His lungs hurt, threaten to close up as he gasps. He can’t - he has to go back to Bucky. He clutches desperately at the presence in his mind, tries to reassure himself with the undeniable knowledge that Bucky is still there, still his soulmate.

“Steve,” Sharon says, firm. Her hand lands on his shoulder again, still firm. The simple touch makes him jump, he’s concentrating so fiercely on his bond. “Steve, you know that going off now is a bad plan.”

“I know,” Steve admits grudgingly. But for all that there weren’t ways to induce a falling in step, there were certainly ways to block them, and Steve was under no illusions about how quickly Bucky would start doing that if - because - he truly thought he wasn’t wanted.

“You’ve got full access to SHIELD’s resources,” Sharon says. “You have a city, maybe a neighbourhood to look through. You know who your soulmate is, you know what he looks like -”

“I know,” Steve says. He might not have thought about it while he was panicking, but he _did_ know that. “I know. That’s a smarter plan, I know, but I -” He rubs his face, scrubs his hand through his hair. “I hate just sitting behind a computer,” he admits, voice too small. “I feel like I can’t do anything. I’m so far away.” And this is the weekend; of all the times for him to need SHIELD equipment, SHIELD software, this might just be the worst of them.

Sharon nods; field agents might rarely be apart from their team in a mission context, but Sharon’s seen enough of her colleagues sent off on missions that she has to know what this feels like. Steve knows that, and he knows that he couldn’t do anything in Bucharest, and yet it doesn’t stop his brain from desperately wishing he could just hop on the next plane to Europe and _go_.

Then again, it’s probably a good thing Sharon’s stopped him. Europe is about eight hours away and eight hours is far too long for Steve to sit unattended with his thoughts in the state that they are.

Steve closes his eyes, brings the heels of his hands up to rub at his face. It doesn’t do much to calm him, but he wasn’t exactly expecting it to. For a moment he wonders whether he should go back to the transcendental meditation, but he’s not that desperate or that forgetful; it’d take more than this for him to forget that transcendental meditation had just meant Steve sitting cross-legged in a dim room failing to be calm, waiting for something to happen and not being particularly surprised when the universe didn’t pull through.

“Really?” Sharon asks as he pulls his computer closer and pulls up Street View on Google Maps. “ _Really_?”

“Shut up,” Steve grumbles. “I have to do something.” Something that’s not reaching into his mind to feel the reassuring presence of his bond every other second. Even if that something is ridiculous and is going to be rendered useless almost as soon as he gets into SHIELD. “I don’t suppose you have after-hours access to the new headquarters?”

Sharon shakes her head. Steve pointedly tamps down on his frustration and glares at the Google Maps Street View of Bucharest on his laptop screen.

“Will you -?” he asks, and Sharon throws her hands up. She knows exactly what he’s going to ask.

“ _Yes_ , I’ll familiarise myself with Bucharest,” she says. “Anything to take that dumb look off your face,” she adds, only half joking with it and pushing him away with a hand to the face.

“There are so many people there,” Steve says fretfully, looking back at the crowds on the street who have their faces blurred out. “And there’d be so many flights to other countries. And trains, and buses -” 

“If he’s stayed this long he’s probably not going to leave now,” Sharon says. “Especially if you haven’t let slip that you know where he is.”

“I - don’t think I did that,” Steve says.

“You’ll be fine,” Sharon soothes, remarkably patient. “You’ll be fine, Steve. You’ll find him.”

Steve takes another deep breath and huffs it out, but it doesn’t help in the slightest: his emotions are everywhere, running rampant, unchecked. He’s scared of meeting Bucky, of not meeting Bucky, of not _finding_ Bucky. He’s scared that Bucky will ask for an arrangement like the one Sharon and her soulmate have, living apart and seeing each other as the bond decides, every few days. Sharon and her soulmate manage fine, he knows that, both of them remarkably dedicated to their work and their doctoral studies respectively, and Steve would do anything for his soulmate, but that - that would be hard for him, he thinks.

“Calm _down_ ,” Sharon says, nudging Steve. “Your mind’s everywhere.”

“Can you blame me?” Steve asks, and if he’s a little hysterical he really does think he can be excused for it.

“No,” Sharon says softly. 

“But it doesn’t help anyone,” Steve says for her, and forces his lungs to expand and contract, even if it doesn’t feel like he’s taking a breath. “It doesn’t help anyone,” he mutters again.

“It’s to be expected,” Sharon says. “There’s a reason why SHIELD prefers you don’t mix personal and professional.”

“I know,” Steve snaps immediately, defensive. “I _know_ -”

“I didn’t mean it like that! Of course you have to do this, I’m just - it’s going to be tougher for you.”

“I know. I just want to find him,” Steve says, staring at the tastefully filtered picture of a Romanian marketplace at the top of some lifestyle blog he’s managed to click on. He knows he sounds pitiful, but he refuses to be self-conscious about it. This is Sharon, and this is his _soulmate_. His soulmate who thinks that Steve doesn’t want him, who thinks Steve would blame him -

It was inconceivable to Steve, the mere thought of it, of not wanting Bucky to be his soulmate, of thinking _Bucky_ was the one who had to apologise for how Steve’s body had been fucked since he was a baby. And yet Bucky had clearly been thinking about it a lot, if it’d been the first thing on his mind.

Steve decides that this is the perfect time to Google _how to break soulbond,_ because he greatly enjoys torturing himself, apparently. For once, Google is reassuring. It’s common knowledge that there’s no way to break a soulbond, and sure enough, the only results that Steve can dig up are from soap operas: the pinnacle of drama that comes with the villain du jour declaring his dastardly plan to tear the protagonist away from her soulmate and into his arms, complete with an equally dastardly laugh and usually a gruesome death afterwards.

It’s growing dark by the time Steve extracts himself from his Google wormhole, but at least now he’s somewhat calmer. It’s been hours; Steve doesn’t have the slightest idea of how one might go about severing a soulbond, and he suspects that Bucky doesn’t either. HYDRA might have been able to find a way to block it, but as soon as Bucky was able to leave them, the bond started stirring again: even HYDRA, with all their time and resources and their complete lack of ethics, hadn’t been able to sever a soulbond, and that was possibly the most reassuring thing of them all.

Just to be safe, though, he calls Erskine, and only realises it’s far past reasonable calling hours when his call is picked up and the voice on the other end of the line is drowsy.

“Abraham Erskine speaking,” he says, the yawn almost audible.

“I - sorry, I shouldn’t have called -” Steve starts to stutter; he calls Erskine on his mobile number every once in a while, but never for medical advice. That stays strictly in the office phone.

“Well, you have, so go on and say it,” Erskine advises, valiantly forcing himself to speak through a yawn.

“I just - you can’t sever a soulbond,” Steve says. “Right?”

“Has your soulbond -?” Erskine starts, suddenly sounding much more awake.

“No!” Steve exclaims, even as he checks for it still to be there, focuses on it as gently as he can. “No, it’s still there, but my, uh, my soulmate, he expressed an interest in it...not being there.”

“Ah,” Erskine says. “Well, you should know that the answer to your question is no,” he says. “And your soulmate sounds like a very silly man, if you’ll pardon my saying so.”

“He’s a scared man, I think,” Steve says quietly. “I - you’re sure, though. He couldn’t -”

“No, he couldn’t,” Erskine says.

“Okay,” Steve says, exhaling probably a little too close to his phone’s speakers, if the crackling he hears is anything to go by. “Okay. Thanks. And I’m sorry again for bothering you -”

“Don’t worry about it,” Erskine says kindly. “Just don’t make a habit of it. I hope things go well with your soulmate, Steven.”

“Me too,” Steve manages.

“You’ll have to make a follow-up appointment with me, once you two have made up,” Erskine says, and that thought shouldn’t make Steve stop in his tracks, shouldn’t make his chest feel wobbly. He could - can - do so many endearingly domestic things with Bucky.

“I’ll do that,” Steve promises. “I think - I think you’ll like him, you know.” Bucky might have made something of a bad first impression through Steve, but he’s exceedingly gentle. He’s kind.

“If he’s your soulmate, Steve, I’ll be predisposed to do that anyway,” Erskine says before hanging up. Steve grins down at the screen of his phone. He feels lighter about things now, as though they’re more concrete: he’s going to find Bucky, and he’s going to convince the idiot that he’s wrong and that he should be with Steve, and then they’re going to do a slew of disgustingly domestic things together, starting with a doctor’s visit.

He can’t wait.

~*~

Steve’s day starts off so well, is the thing. He gets to work a little earlier than normal and proceeds to ignore every single thing demanding his attention - the sticky notes that have somehow gotten everywhere, the emails in his inbox, the files scattered over his desk - with a focus that his work can only wish it could be the subject of.

Bucky’s clever, he’s resourceful, and Steve knows it, so he widens the range of features that the facial recognition program is allowed to catch to an almost unrealistic stage, a safety net that far exceeds any place Bucky should be able to go. He combs through the results with a single-minded focus that has him tuning out even Sharon’s presence in the room; she leaves once, he thinks, and he’s not sure after that, when she comes back, if she comes back at all. His computer gathers results from cameras billed as closed-circuit, from city council-owned cameras, airport cameras, and Steve tries his best to scan every face the program catches, to scrutinise it for features of Bucky.

It’s slow work, but he feels like he’s getting somewhere. He’s doing something productive, gaining a camera-directed knowledge of Bucharest, looking for his soulmate. There’s no known way for his soulmate to sever their bond, and he’s going to _find_ his soulmate. He’s getting somewhere, until Sharon comes back into their room and says, “Oh, Steve, are you okay?” with sympathy painted all over her features.

Steve stares blankly, and something like dread starts to curl in his chest. “...Yes?” comes out of him like a question.

“Oh,” Sharon says. “Oh, have you not - um, checked your email?”

“I - no,” Steve says. His email isn’t even open. He doesn’t want to open it, he thinks, as though not reading whatever email Sharon is so concerned about will make it not true.

“You should, um, check it now, then,” Sharon says, avoiding his eyes. The dread - definitely dread, now - settles in Steve’s stomach, concrete and heavy, as he minimises his search program and brings up his inbox. Sharon’s sympathetic, worried gaze does nothing to alleviate the feeling.

He knows what email Sharon’s talking about as soon as he lays eyes on it, for all that it’s already been pushed down to fifth position by newer messages. _Winter Soldier Threat Level Raised,_ it says, and the dread transforms into nausea, as fast as Steve can register what that means.

The Winter Soldier’s threat level has been bumped upwards not just once but twice. He’s at the stage where killing and capturing grow interchangeable as mission objectives. SHIELD might still say that they want him for questioning, but if he ends up dead in the field somehow they won’t grieve much and the agent responsible probably won’t even get a slap on the wrist. That’s what they’re saying. Steve wants to throw up.

“ _Why_?” he chokes out, eyes scanning the email like if he looks long enough it’ll be a prank, or a fake, or a terrible, terrible joke.

“They decrypted the list of people he’s responsible for assassinating,” Sharon says simply. “Before, we just knew it was 54 people. Now we know which 54 and fuck, Steve, it’s bad. It’s really, really bad.”

“Please don’t,” Steve says.

“I asked Coulson about it,” Sharon says softly. “Tried asking him to put it back down, but, well, I never had that sort of bargaining power even in the original SHIELD. And I didn’t know how much to say, about, you know. James. And you.”

“Thanks anyway, Sharon,” Steve says, as honestly as he can manage while he’s trying his best not to panic. His brain doesn’t help at all, choosing instead to present all the worst case scenarios: Bucky dead, Bucky captured by SHIELD, Bucky captured by HYDRA. Bucky interrogated.

He folds his arms across his chest in a weak attempt to stop his heart from trying to hammer its way out. “Okay,” he mutters to himself, and shakes his head once, decisive. First things first: delete every single one of the searches he’s been running from SHIELD’s public record. He’s sure that they’re backed up somewhere - nothing is ever deleted, not in SHIELD - but deleting everything at once like this will make sure that lower-level operatives can’t see it, at least, and higher-level operatives are going to have to wade through weeks of Steve’s searches to stumble across the ones he has going for James.

“They’ve added a picture to the database,” Sharon says from her seat. “They found one in the encrypted files, can you see it?”

“I see it,” Steve confirms a second later. This newest picture is the Winter Soldier’s blank face, long hair and a thin, gaunt face that is the opposite of the young Army man Steve is used to seeing on the SHIELD database. A sharp scar runs along one of his cheeks; it must have healed since the picture was taken, because it certainly hadn’t been there when Steve fell in step with him.

For all that those are both objectively good things - the sharp contrasts between the fullness of James’s Army portrait and how gaunt he became in his time with HYDRA will confuse the facial recognition programs, as will the scar on his face - the sight of his soulmate makes Steve stop in his tracks for a second, makes him pause. It’s almost a compulsion, leaning forward to run a finger lightly across his screen, wondering what could’ve happened to make Bucky’s body scar over.

“We can’t change the images, can we,” Steve says, staring at two pictures SHIELD has of his soulmate.

“I could,” Sharon says. “Technically. But that’s SHIELD material, we shouldn’t be tampering. You should be taking this to Coulson, maybe higher -”

“SHIELD agents are now allowed to _shoot my soulmate_ ,” Steve tries to whisper. It comes out as a slightly sharp hiss instead, and Steve takes a breath before continuing. “I’ll go talk to Coulson, I swear I will, but I can’t let - that could take ages, Sharon. I don’t want him to be exposed to everyone in SHIELD while I’m trying to, to deal with bureaucracy.”

“Alright,” Sharon says. “So I can change it.”

“I know you can,” Steve says, “but it’s not your skills I’m doubting. It’s just, that’s an official Army picture of him. He’s in - he’s in fucking _history books_. His whole face is public record.”

“You are - right,” Sharon breathes, and scrubs a hand over her own face. “Fuck, you’re right. I’m not thinking.”

“I’m just glad the camerawork in the forties was so terrible,” Steve says. “Can’t really grab a specific face shape for the recognition programs from those little films.” And Bucky seemed to be in so many of those; as Captain America’s second in command and a man, sometimes it seemed like he was featured more than Captain America herself.

“That’s fucking wild,” Sharon breathes, running a hand over her hair. “I barely even realised - your soulmate’s in the _history books_. Damn.”

“I know!” Steve says, almost a laugh even though he doesn’t feel particularly happy about it, right now. His soulmate is far too wanted and far too recognisable, and that’s a dangerous combination. “I know. I can’t believe it, sometimes. I don't know. I think I still need time to sit down and be surprised about it.”

“We can still change these pictures of him, though,” Sharon says.

“Please,” Steve says, rolling his eyes, “everyone else is going to recognise that -”

“Not if we just change it a little,” Sharon says consideringly. “I don’t know, what do the recognition programs get most confused about? Eye shape, right, and they get really set in their ways about scars -”

“That’s genius,” Steve breathes, sitting up straighter. “Just - tiny bits, here and there -”

“Barely noticeable to anyone but the recognition programs,” Sharon says. “Can you do the retouching?”

“ _Can_ I,” Steve mutters, sending the picture to his tablet so that SHIELD won’t register his opening a photo-manipulation program on a work computer. “Fucking watch me.” He feels like a plastic surgeon, or what he imagines a plastic surgeon feels like, staring at Bucky’s face: what can he change? Where will it make the most difference?

Bucky ends up with darker eyes of a slightly different shape and less prominent cheekbones in both pictures, and a more prominent scar in the later one. He looks - very slightly different, and for a few long moment it’s all Steve can do to stare down at his work, because the man in the photograph looks like Bucky but he also truly does not. It’s incredibly jarring. He only realises that his leg is bouncing underneath the table when the tablet perched on his lap grows hard to focus on.

“You all right?” Sharon asks, gentle.

“Yeah,” Steve says, shaking his head and trying to ignore the clenching anxiety in his chest at everything that could go wrong if they do this, if they don’t do this. He can’t win. “Yeah, I - what d’you think?”

Sharon squints at the tablet he turns to show her and wiggles her hand. “Should be fine,” she says. “I can barely see a difference, to be honest, but if I could that wouldn’t be good either. It should confuse the facial recognition, at least.”

“You think it’s different enough?” Steve asks, squinting down at his tablet. The differences glare up at him, but he’s biased.

“You could change his jaw more,” Sharon suggests.

“Sharon, there are entire fan clubs devoted to that jaw,” Steve says.

“I guess you’d know,” she says, wiggling her eyebrows. Steve tries and fails to swat her away.

“Fuck off,” he mumbles. He’s blocked out his high school years entirely but, well, he hadn’t exactly disliked James B. Barnes. His eyes had been quick to linger on the face that’d stared up at him, plastic and glossy and so very dashing. As, Steve was sure, was the case for a million other schoolkids across America.

“Gotta keep track of the competition,” Sharon says shamelessly, and grins at Steve’s glare.

“How’s this?” Steve asks, ignoring the smirk on Sharon’s face and turning his tablet towards her again.

“Better, I think,” Sharon says. “Have you made his jaw _sharper_?”

“It’s known for its sharpness,” Steve says, ignoring the little eyebrow wiggle Sharon directs at him. “Everyone’s going to notice if it gets softer, but if it gets a little sharper -”

“Good. Good point,” Sharon says. “Okay, send that over.” As Steve watches, she deletes the communal photographs that SHIELD has on Bucky and reuploads what Steve’s sent her. It’s a surprisingly simple process - just the click of a few buttons - and yet it has Steve twitching, has him looking over at their door in anticipation of someone bursting in to arrest them.

“We’ll be fine,” Sharon says, remarkably cool as she shuts her laptop and reaches across their desk to squeeze on Steve’s hand. “But you - we - have to make other plans.”

“I know,” Steve says. Changing Bucky’s picture is going to confuse the recognition systems for a while, but someone’s going to notice soon enough; SHIELD agents aren’t in their jobs because they miss things like that, and at that point Steve runs the risk of being fired.

He’d go talk to Coulson about it, since Coulson was probably the highest-ranking accessible officer in the new SHIELD, except - “Coulson signed off on the decision, didn’t he?” he asks. Sharon bites her lip, nods.

“Can you get much higher than him?” she asks, echoing Steve’s thoughts exactly.

“Can you get me a meeting with the Falcon?” Steve asks. “Or the Black Widow?”

“Can _I_ get you a meeting? Me?” Sharon asks. “Me, a lowly field agent -”

“You’re not lowly,” Steve says crossly. “Being a field agent at all puts you pretty damn high in the pecking order, not to mention being a well-known agent -”

“So naturally I’m going to have worked with the Falcon or the Widow,” Sharon says, in her brightest and most agreeable tone, the one she uses when she’s feeling particularly disagreeable. “That works out.” She relents when Steve slumps, nudges at him with a foot. “For what it’s worth, I would love to have worked a mission with them, but I haven’t. I don’t know them any better than you do. You really don’t want to go to Coulson?” she asks, softer, when Steve doesn’t say anything.

“He’s the one who signed off on the decision,” he protests. “I want to go higher. And,” he says, “They’re more sympathetic. You remember in the initial reports, the Falcon and the Widow were the ones who -”

“Who raised the possibility of his brainwashing,” Sharon recalls.

“They might technically be an independent party now, but Coulson would still listen to them.”

“Okay,” Sharon says. “You win. Getting one of them on your side would be - yeah.”

“I just need them to agree to meet me,” Steve says. “And I don’t know how - I can’t catch them someplace, I don’t think, and just spring my problems onto them.” Plus, he’s heard that Tony Stark has booby-trapped his tower for unsuspecting reporters and curious bystanders, and he doesn’t want to risk that. “Email? Would they -?”

“I’ll help you draft it,” Sharon says, and Steve feels like he melts in his chair.

“Thank you,” he says earnestly, even though it doesn’t strictly need to be said, even though he knows Sharon will wave it away, and she does. Some things need to be said out loud; Steve had learned that lesson the hard way, he thinks resentfully, staring down at his lap. If his dumb soulmate had just let him _talk_ -

His laptop lets out a _ding_ as a new email notification pops up. For a moment Steve’s heart feels just about ready to give out before he sees that it has nothing to do with Bucky Barnes or the Winter Soldier.

“We just need to stay calm,” he says, looking at Sharon and taking out his tablet to draft their email on. She nods at him.

“Just stay calm.”

“We haven’t done anything to _not_ be calm about,” Steve says, and pulls himself back to his desk, shutting his computer and surreptitiously making sure that Sharon is between the doorway and his tablet, just in case. And if he tucks his chair a little closer to the table than usual, nobody can prove that it’s to pointedly remind his heart and stomach not to jump out of his body with nervousness.

~*~

The world doesn’t deserve the Falcon - Sam Wilson, as he’d said to call him in his replying email - Steve’s sure of it. He and Sharon had argued for what seemed like hours on what to include in an email that was going to make its way across the internet, what to include and what to imply and what to leave out entirely, but their final product must have been okay because they’d gotten a response within the day, giving them a time and a place.

“I hope you realise you look like a common stalker with your neck stretched out like that,” Sharon says, arms folded mutinously against the cold as she glares down at the little chess table where they’d been told to meet Wilson.

“Even if I was a stalker, there’d be nothing common about me,” Steve snips back. It isn’t the cleverest comeback, but he’s currently rather occupied, so he thinks he can be cut a little slack.

Sharon snorts, but she can’t say much because Steve has just put her king in check again and she insists that the cold makes her brain lose all its processing function, despite the fact that she is a mammal and can generate her own warmth. “I change my mind about the Falcon. He’s a fucking asshole to have us freezing our asses off at fuck o’clock in the morning.”

“It’s six o’clock,” Steve says. “I thought you were the tough field agent -”

“Fuck you,” Sharon mutters, pulling her jacket tighter around her.

“Checkmate,” Steve says, and doesn’t bother to hide the smugness in his voice. Sharon scoffs, but doesn’t say anything more, only joins Steve in scanning the empty park. He understands why a superhero would want to jog in the early morning; the park is already starting to buzz with joggers at six in the morning.

“I’m going to do some recon,” Sharon says, standing abruptly. “I can’t just sit on this fucking metal, my butt’s going numb. Who thought metal chairs were a good idea?”

“Not a genius, clearly,” Steve says, in lieu of admitting that his butt is also going numb. “I’ll be here,” he adds, and starts rearranging the chess pieces into their starting positions.

Sharon stomps away, muttering about terrible plans and unseasonable cold. Beside her, the sun rises steadily. Steve wonders exactly how fun it would be to play a chess game against himself, and comes to the conclusion that not only would it be exceedingly boring but he would also probably look like a lunatic.

It wouldn’t be terribly surprising, Steve thinks dolefully, that the day he’s arranged to meet Wilson here is the day the Avengers get called away on an impromptu mission.

“Can I cut in?” a guy asks, sliding into the seat opposite Steve and only wincing slightly at the cold metal.

“Sure,” Steve says (like the idiot he is, he will castigate himself later) and somewhat absent-mindedly moves a pawn to E4.

Sharon comes back halfway through a somewhat subdued game. In Steve’s defence, it’s not a very absorbing game; he doesn’t have to pay much attention to it, so he ends up continuing to scan the park for Wilson instead.

“Oh, you found him,” Sharon says once she’s close enough. “You could’ve texted me or something.”

“Found him?” Steve asks.

“Found him?” the guy says, and he’s so distracted that he makes an absolutely catastrophic move that Steve immediately takes advantage of. “Me?” His voice is so absolutely innocent that Steve narrows his eyes at him on instinct.

“Checkmate,” Steve says, and the guy swears under his breath. “What d’you mean, found him?”

“I mean,” Sharon says, seemingly caught between annoyance and laughter, “that that’s the Falcon, you absolute doofus.”

“Me?” the guy says again, but this time there’s a shit-eating grin in front of the innocent tone. Steve looks at him properly for the first time and, wow, he’s an idiot. He’s an absolute fuckwit. The one guy he comes to this park expressly to see, and Steve doesn’t recognise him when he literally sits down in front of Steve and offers to play a game of chess.

And it’s not just the fact that he’d come to meet a specific man; Sam Wilson became one of the most recognisable men in the world when, just after 9/11, he’d been the first black man to take up the mantle of Captain America. And then he’d become the most controversial man in the country when he’d resigned to become SHIELD’s Falcon, citing philosophical and ethical differences between himself and the government. Steve doesn’t think it’d be a stretch to call him the best-known man in the country, and Steve _hadn’t recognised him over a game of chess_. Fucking unbelievable.

“Fucking unbelievable,” Steve says out loud.

“You see any other Falcons round here?” Sharon asks Wilson.

“I’m an idiot,” Steve says, still staring at an increasingly-amused Avenger.

“You are,” Sharon says without remorse.

Wilson gamely offers Steve a hand. “Wilson,” he says. “Sam Wilson. I suppose you didn’t just decide that six a.m. was the perfect time to come here for a chess match, then.”

“If you call that a match,” Steve says, and almost immediately wants to smack himself. Sharon looks torn between horror and laughter, but Wilson smiles widely.

“Oh, that’s how it is?”

“That’s how it is,” Steve says, and then he can feel the half-smile melt off his face as he then leans forward to put all his cards on the table, curls his cold fingers into his palms and hopes. “Listen, no, I work for SHIELD, like I said. I’m an analyst.”

“Okay,” Wilson says. “You said you had information on the Winter Soldier.”

“I did,” Steve says. “I mean, I do. He’s - he’s my -” so much for all cards on the table, he thinks somewhat bitterly, because he can’t bring himself to say the word, his heart in his mouth too afraid of giving up his soulmate and conspiring against him because of it. He gestures instead, incoherent. “My _soulmate_ ,” he forces out, although he really couldn’t tell whether it was comprehensible.

Miraculously, Sam Wilson seems to understand this, or he at least acts like he does. “He is, huh?” he asks, leaning back.

“You said - in the report we got,” Steve says. “You said you were ready to swear that he was brainwashed.”

“Wasn’t he?”

“He _was_ ,” Steve says instantly, fiercely. Sharon puts a hand on his shoulder. “He was, he was. He didn’t do anything in that file of his own volition, I know he didn’t. It’s in his files that he was tortured, it has to be -”

“So why come to me?” Wilson asks.

“SHIELD upgraded Ja - Barnes’s threat level,” Sharon supplies, when Steve can’t help but grow tight-lipped at the thought of what’d necessitated this. “He’s - well, shoot to capture, basically. And there’s a fair number of kills in the shoot to capture threat level bracket.”

“Sounds like you should be taking this to Coulson,” Wilson observes.

“Coulson’s the one who upgraded the threat level,” Steve says. “I wanted someone besides me to - to -”

He gestures again, unsure of what even he means.

“Besides,” he adds. “I’m a biased party. I need impartial backup.”

“You’ve stepped out?” Wilson wants to know. “You’ve seen him, post-HYDRAgate?”

“Yes,” Steve says. Wilson eyeballs him.

“What about before?” he asks. It’s one of those questions that’s been leaving Steve sleepless over how to answer because he’s damned either way: if he knew about Bucky before, he’s probably accessory to a solid few murders, but if he had no idea then people will trust his opinion even less, because what would he know about a deadly and now world-famous assassin? What could he know, after barely a few weeks?

“I - I didn’t,” Steve admits, finally. “I only fell into step with him a little while ago. HYDRA was - was blocking our bond, somehow, I grew up thinking I was bondless. You can ask my doctor for my medical records. His name’s Erskine,” Steve adds, when he sees Wilson’s mouth open. “Dr. Abraham Erskine. He’s been my doctor ever since I was a kid.”

“Okay,” Wilson says. “I’ll have a talk with - my colleagues, and if your story checks out then I’ll talk to Coulson -”

“ _Thank you_ ,” Steve says fervently.

“Between you and me,” Wilson says, leaning forward again, “he’s - we think he’s reached out. Or at least let Natasha find him, which is pretty much the same as reaching out.”

“I couldn’t find him,” Steve says. “I’ve been trying ever since I first saw his face, and I -”

“No offence, but JARVIS is a lot more advanced than whatever SHIELD’s working with,” Wilson says. Steve nods, tries not to rankle at the fact that he couldn’t find his own damn soulmate.

“Please,” he says instead. “If you can talk to him. Please tell him he misunderstood me. I - don’t want him to sever our bond. I _don’t_.”

Wilson nods once, sharp, authoritative, and then he stands up. “You alright with me bringing your name into it with Coulson, if he asks?”

“Yes,” Steve says, impulsively, against his better judgement. “Thank you,” he repeats. Wilson just nods as he starts to jog away.

Sharon sits down in his vacated seat and grins. “Warm,” she offers when Steve eyes her, and then she continues to smile as he groans.

“D’you think it’ll work?” Steve asks. “That he’ll actually be able to, y’know, change SHIELD’s mind?”

“It’s going to work,” Sharon says, voice firm. Neither of them can be sure of that, but Steve’s just about anxious enough that he appreciates the words anyway.

~*~

The next day, Steve is called into a meeting with Coulson and chastised for not going to him first, as expected, although Steve had been slightly surprised at the speed at which Wilson seemed to work; Bucky’s threat level has been lowered, as Steve hadn’t dared to let himself expect. For all that there’s relief in Steve’s chest, it feels like a hollow victory; more as every day turns into weeks and threatens to turn into a month - he still hasn’t seen Bucky since that last disastrous interaction, and their bond lies inert in his mind. Every time his focus returns to it, which is probably concerningly often, he can’t help but to wonder whether Bucky’s blocking him, whether Steve’s message had been passed on, or whether it’d been passed on and Bucky didn’t care.

“Are bonds - are they just, just meant to be there? Not doing anything?” he asks Sharon anxiously. Sharon has nothing useful to say on the matter. Google also has nothing useful to contribute. Steve is just about ready to combust.

He’s in his fourth week of no signal, no motion, no sign from their bond, and Steve won’t admit to himself that he’s starting to worry. It doesn’t work - he’s fucking worried and that’d started weeks ago, he lies awake at night because of it, thinking about what could go wrong, what could go right, what he could say to convince Bucky to stay - but if he pretends not to be, sometimes it feels almost as though he can fake it ‘til he makes it. He’s not sure who exactly he’s trying to convince, but he’s started the act now and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t finish it. Or, alternatively, if he keeps on thinking about how Bucky hasn’t stepped in yet - how Bucky thought he wasn’t _wanted_ \- Steve’s going to end up crying, probably.

And then, finally, the day after a month had officially passed, Steve’s sitting on the couch in his apartment, contemplating the choices of getting up to turn on the TV or slumping sideways and napping when he hears it: a soft thud, a quiet, “Shit,” in a voice that’s already painfully familiar.

“Bucky?” he asks as he turns around, even though he doesn’t really need the confirmation. He knows his soulmate’s voice, and when he turns he knows his soulmate’s shape and figure. His soulmate, who is currently frozen in place, mouth open and silent, eyes wide.

The two of them stare at each other for one long moment. Steve’s heart threatens to fly out of his chest; Steve is very tempted to follow suit. Finally, Bucky makes an uncertain, cracked sort of noise which seems to break him out of his stupor, because he tries to run _himself_ into the closest wall, like the absolute idiot he is. Steve, in the interest of putting a stop to this idiocy, flings himself messily over the top of the couch in a desperate attempt to catch his errant soulmate. This only works because said errant soulmate’s first instinct is to catch Steve and set him back on his feet, but Steve still counts it as a win.

“Bucky,” he gasps, embarrassingly short on breath from nothing but a brief touch of his soulmate’s hands on him. “Bucky, you came back,” he says, and winds his hands through Bucky’s shirt because it makes something deep in his chest ache to think that Bucky would try to throw himself through a wall to get away from Steve, even if he’s doing it because he thinks that's what Steve wants. But Bucky had stepped in to see _Steve,_ , this time, had been the one to step out of his surroundings for the first time. That meant something, it had to mean something.

Steve opens his mouth to say more, something, anything, but he can’t; he’s spent so long obsessing over what he could say, how to convince Bucky that he’s wanted, and now when he needs the most the words have fled him.

“You’re okay,” Bucky is the one to say, half question and half reassurance as he puts Steve down. His voice is soft and raw, the best thing Steve has heard in a long time. He has to fight the instinct to clutch tighter, to keep his soulmate _here _and _beside him___ , where he’s supposed to be. If Bucky doesn’t want to be here, then Steve can’t - won’t - keep him. Even if his disobedient fingers shiver and, reluctant to let go, trail down Bucky’s arm as Bucky starts pulling away.

“No, wait, Bucky, please,” he says then, and the words start to tumble out. “You misunderstood me last time, I swear. Did you get my message? I’m sorry for what you had to go through. I’m sorry that I couldn’t be there for you. I’m sorry that I never thought to try and look for you while - while you -”

Bucky makes a soft sound of protest, and Steve glares at him. “I’m not sorry you’re my soulmate,” he says, fierce. “I’m not sorry about that, not ever. I wouldn’t even know how to be.”

“You _should_ ,” Bucky says, but he’s stopped moving away, has turned his body so that he’s facing Steve instead of the nearest wall, no longer so ready to run.

“I shouldn’t and I won’t,” Steve says, aware that he sounds like a petulant child. “You don’t think I get to have some say in this?”

“I -” Bucky starts, and then stops, floundering slightly. His mouth opens and shuts. “Your message?”

“I talked to Sam Wilson. He said you let Natasha Romanoff find you.” Bucky inclines his head just a little. “I thought - I asked him to pass that along to you. If he saw you again.”

“Pass what along?”

“It - that it wasn’t your fault,” Steve says, looking his soulmate straight in the eyes, as earnest as he knows how to be. “Will you listen? It wasn’t your fault. You said it yourself, that you were tortured.” Very gently, he tugs Bucky away from the wall he’d been heading towards, and Bucky follows.

“I -” Bucky says again, and then, soft, says, “I want to believe you.” Steve's unsubtle moving of him has accidentally placed him in front of a window. Late afternoon sunlight filters in from behind him and positively lights him up until he looks like he glows, until he looks more like an angel than an apparition.

“Then do,” Steve says. “Will you let me in?” he asks, tapping on the silent end of his bond for emphasis. His chest feels like it’s imploding, just slightly, as he waits for a response. “I - you don’t have to. If you don’t want to, then don’t. But don’t do it for me. Don’t ever think that I want you gone.”

For a long, dreadful moment, Bucky simply stands there, motionless, and Steve holds perfectly still as though this will help his case. He feels like he needs his inhaler, even if he hasn’t used the thing in years.

Then, very slowly, Bucky does - something, Steve doesn’t know what, exactly, but he does know that their bond starts to flicker, and the next thing he can feel is a soft, wistful kind of longing that takes his breath away.

“Sorry,” Bucky says, gruff and trying to hide the longing behind something, to shove it into the back of his mind.

“No, don’t -” Steve chokes out, and in the interests of fairness he pulls his own emotions to the forefront of his mind, tries to push all of his own tangled ball of sadness and happiness and pining through to Bucky, everything he’d never dare to say out loud, everything he wouldn’t know how to begin to say.

“Oh,” Bucky says, soft. Stunned, maybe. He’s the one to reach forward, this time, his right hand gentle on Steve’s cheek.

His other arm - his metal arm - is tucked behind him ever so slightly. Steve curls his fingers around it and pulls it close even as he leans into the warmth of the touch against his face. It makes a small smile crack across Bucky’s face, worn and tired but there, undeniable.

“Will - will you tell me where you are?” Steve asks, because he can’t quite keep from pushing his luck. “I’d like to meet you. You don’t have to,” he adds hastily, as Bucky’s face falls back into lines of melancholy, his right hand falling back to his side. His left hand, still cradled between Steve’s, doesn’t pull away; a small victory. “I’d just - like to meet you.”

“I’d like that, too,” Bucky admits. “But - I don’t -”

“I could tell you where I am,” Steve says. “I could tell you, and you could come to me. As fast or as slow as you want. Or - we don’t have to,” he says. “We could just - stay like this. I wouldn’t mind, as long as you’re happy.”

“Tell me where you are,” Bucky says.

Steve rattles off his address, watches concentration flare in Bucky’s eyes and then recede, just as quickly. “You’ll visit me?” he asks, and, as childish as it might be, follows it up with, “You promise?”

“I promise,” Bucky says, but there’s something sad in his eyes, in the bond, as he says it, like he expects Steve to change his mind, to rescind the invitation.

“I’ll be waiting,” Steve says. He doesn’t want to push, doesn’t think they’re close enough to kiss, both literally and figuratively. But he’s still cradling Bucky’s hand, and it’s the work of a moment for him to bend down and press his lips to the cool metal, to try and push how much he does want this through their bond. “As fast or as slow as you want, remember,” he says. “I’ll look forward to it.”

“I remember,” Bucky says, and doesn’t protest when Steve leads him back to the couch, or when Steve pushes and prods at the two of them until Bucky is lying with his head in Steve’s lap and his feet slung over the other end of the couch.

Steve runs his fingers through Bucky’s hair, gentle, and a fierce and overwhelming pride takes up residence in his chest at the sight of Bucky relaxing, Bucky closing his eyes, Bucky leaning into Steve’s touch and letting himself forget about the outside world even briefly.

“M’gonna fall asleep if you keep that up,” he warns, even as he tilts his head to give Steve better access to his head. His words slur a little, more Brooklyn than Steve’s ever heard them.

“You in a safe place to sleep?” Steve asks. Bucky hums in the affirmative. “S’alright, then,” Steve says, even as he knows that Bucky falling asleep will mean that they fall out of step; sleeping brains aren’t organised or functional enough to stay in step, much to the chagrin of soulmates who are separated by significant time differences.

Bucky tilts his head up, presses a quick kiss of his own to Steve’s hand. Steve can’t quite tamp down on the fireworks of happiness that lets loose in his brain, but judging by the gentle smile on Bucky’s face he doesn’t mind. “I’ll come to you,” Bucky murmurs softly, still tired, still Brooklyn.

It doesn’t take very long for him to fall asleep, and Steve has just enough time to hope that he truly is somewhere secure before Bucky’s soul-bond body fades out from under Steve’s hands.

~*~

To the surprise of exactly nobody, Steve is terrible at waiting. He can’t stop thinking about Bucky, and it shows: about what might have gone wrong if he’d fallen asleep in the wrong place, about whether he’s truly going to keep his word and come to Steve, about whether America’s safe for him, whether he should enter the country at all. His SHIELD status has lowered, but Steve’s under no illusions about the other alphabet soup organisations.

Sharon, bless her, puts up with it like a saint, and only tells him a few times to stop pacing and stop scanning through airport cameras and stop smashing his face into his keyboard at work.

“It’s not like you’ve stopped falling in step,” Sharon points out multiple times. “You’ll still be able to talk to him in a few days.”

“I know, but it won’t be the same,” Steve grouches back at her, every time. He’s already checking frequently on their bond, but when they’re not together - whether fallen in step together or physically together - the bond’s not really capable of much more than reaffirming that the person on the other end is alive and somewhat okay. Which Bucky is, thank fuck.

A few times a day, Steve’s facial recognition program will ping him and he’ll drop everything - literally, sometimes, if he happens to be holding anything - but it never turns out to be Bucky. His heart dips into his stomach at that, every time, and Sharon takes it upon herself to switch off the program. It probably says a lot that Steve can’t bring himself to turn it back on.

“Hey,” Sharon says from across Steve’s desk, ten days after Bucky’s stepping in, when Steve has started to grow jittery with waiting not only for his errant soulmate to fucking make it to America but also for their next falling in step. “ _Hey_.”

“What?” Steve asks, looking up from the work he’s really not concentrating on. If she has questions about anything he’s going to be useless, and he’s already bracing himself for Sharon’s silent disapproval when he finally notices the meaningful flicker of her eyes to the door behind him.

When he turns around, Bucky’s there.

Steve freezes. His blood thunders in his ears, and he can barely make out Sharon’s, “I think you’ve broken him.”

 _Steve_ , Bucky’s mouth shapes as he takes a hesitant step forward, although given the thrumming of blood in his ears Steve really couldn’t say whether Bucky had accompanied the mouthing with a noise. There’s a nudge at their bond, and that’s what has Steve springing into action, jumping up to pull Bucky forward and slamming the door shut behind him. Bucky watches, bemusement on his face, as Steve throws his back against the now-closed door and locks it.

“Bucky - you - you can’t -” he sputters, “- you can’t be here! They’re _looking for you_ , you great idiot -”

“Not anymore,” Bucky says, quietly confident. He reaches out to take Steve’s hand, and Steve is so confused, oh fuck, he’s holding his soulmate’s hand, his soulmate’s touching him, his soulmate is probably in _mortal danger_ , he’s literally _walked right into the building of the people who’re looking for him_ , Steve’s soulmate who is touching him is an _idiot of the highest order_.

Steve chokes. He thinks he might be trying to say something but even he couldn’t say what.

“Will you listen to me?” Bucky asks, squeezing Steve’s hand and trying to send him calmness, through the bond. “I let Natalia find me again. She dragged me back to her base and she and her team are wrangling everyone into not wanting to kill me. I’m not in the danger you think I am.”

“You’re in the danger I don’t think you’re in?” Steve squawks. Bucky smiles at him, which is desperately unfair because Steve can’t concentrate while that smile is aimed at him. Bucky looks better than he had before, Steve realises belatedly. He’s filled out slightly. The smile on his mouth seems to come easier. His eyes are brighter.

“Unofficially, I’m in no danger at all,” he says. His thumb starts rubbing across the back of Steve’s hand, small movements that succeed in being reassuring mostly because they confuse Steve into not getting more anxious.

“You promise?” Steve resorts to asking again, shifting their grips so that his fingers can intertwine with Bucky’s.

“Yeah, Steve,” Bucky says, soft and swaying in towards Steve. “I promise.”

 _I want to kiss you_ , Steve wants to say. His mouth can’t quite manage to get it out, but Bucky must get it somehow, because he shifts even closer and distengles his fingers from Steve’s to reach up and, very gently, touch Steve’s cheek. Steve, bereft, reaches forward to cradle Bucky’s metal hand, intertwines their fingers again and watches softness melt through Bucky’s eyes.

They’re so close. This is the closest Steve thinks he’s ever been to his soulmate, and then somehow they’re even closer, and their first kiss is the gentlest thing in the world, a light touch of lips that revels in its own reality. Steve rises to stand on his tiptoes, steadies himself with a hand on Bucky’s shoulder and shivers, just a little, when he feels Bucky’s hand wrap around his waist.

When Bucky pulls away he brushes a closed-mouth kiss against Steve’s forehead, and it’s probably not a coincidence that Steve sways into him in that moment, lets himself be held up.

“God, I think I’m getting cavities just watching you two,” Sharon says loudly. Steve actually jumps as he registers that he’s not, in fact, alone in a room with Bucky. He’s not proud of it, but it does have the unintended effect of getting Bucky to wrap his arms around Steve, and Steve really can’t complain about this turn of events.

“Good,” he says - loudly, because he wants her to hear it but he doesn’t want to turn and direct his voice. “I’m just going to - knock off early, then.”

“Sure, Steve,” Sharon says, her amusement clear.

“I don’t really want to move,” Bucky says, his tone one of confession and gentle happiness radiating through their bond. It’s less explosive than Steve’s happiness, which is bright and effervescent and vivid, but it’s just as deep, just as content.

“Here -” Steve says, and tucks himself into Bucky’s side, drags Bucky’s arm over his shoulder and wraps his own arm around Bucky waist. “Okay?”

“Better than okay,” Bucky says. His eyes shine as he looks down at Steve, and it’s enough to almost make Steve want to duck down and hide them both somewhere the world can’t get at them. “Where to?”

“I - my apartment?” Steve asks as he unlocks the door. Despite their previous conversation he can’t quite help the way he looks around the corridor to make sure it’s all clear.

“I have a base,” Bucky offers. “In Avengers Tower. The floor above Natalia’s.”

Avenger’s Tower isn’t even five minutes away from SHIELD’s new facility. “Sold,” Steve says. “I’ll - uh, see you soon, then, Sharon,” he remembers to say, on the threshold.

“You probably won’t, but okay,” Sharon says, still insufferable and amused.

“Alright,” Steve says. He takes a breath, and double-checks the corridor. When he looks up, Bucky is smiling down at him, and Steve bites his lip, takes his soulmate’s hand. “Let’s go, then,” he says, soft, and they take their first steps together in the best way Steve can imagine: into a bright future, together, and utterly wrapped around each other.

**Author's Note:**

> say hi to the author on [tumblr](http://layersofsilences.tumblr.com)
> 
> & show [sgt-graves](http://sgt-graves.tumblr.com) some love for their fantastic art ([masterpost here!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14934369)) as well!


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